“I wanted to make you feel even a tiny bit of what I’ve been through. You haven’t got a clue what prison’s like! In all these years, you’ve never even asked. And I’m still a prisoner—I can’t get a job, have any freedom. You keep control of me, make sure I don’t interfere with your precious new existence . . .”

“You were the one who skipped parole. You could’ve rebuilt your life, stayed out of mine—”

“You don’t get it, do you? My life was over the second I was convicted. There was no way to go back.”

An image came into Steph’s head: Becca’s pale, stunned face turning toward her as she’d been led out of the courtroom following the verdict. Quick on its heels, the moment Steph had strolled out of her comfortable home twenty-one years later, texting thirteen-year-old Freya to make sure she’d got to school, and stopped dead because Becca had been standing in front of her. Aged and dull-eyed. The embodiment of everything Steph had tried to escape.

Becca had skipped parole, left the halfway house where she’d been living since her release, and made it her mission to reappear in her cousin’s life. She’d figured out Steph’s workplace from a comment Steph had let slip the one time she’d visited her in prison, and from that her new name, eventually her address. And Steph couldn’t turn her away, though she’d bundled her hastily into her car that first morning, out from under the neighborhood’s gaze. Of course she’d had to provide her with a home, money, a strange kind of companionship and protection. What she couldn’t offer was a real place in her new family. If she had, maybe things would have been different.

As the years had gone on, Steph had continued to fund Becca’s unofficial existence, sneaking off to visit her in the maisonette whenever she could. They’d fallen into a routine of small-talk and tea, as though Becca was an elderly relative Steph was dutifully checking on. But it had sat there between them. The injustice of Steph’s freedom and happiness versus Becca’s limited life.

“I wanted to turn Freya against you,” Becca said, “to show her you weren’t everything you claimed. That was all.”

Steph closed her eyes. Her other big mistake had been ever to utter her daughter’s name to Becca. Her pride in Freya, her inability to shut up about her . . .

“You told me about the argument with Freya’s driving instructor.”

Steph’s eyes flew open. “What?”