Why hadn’t she asked Paul about his past?

It wasn’t always easy to ask the question.

Steph perched on Freya’s bed and brushed her hair back from her face, checking the dressed wound. She couldn’t help picturing, for the hundredth time, the moment of Freya’s head hitting Chris’s dashboard. Freya couldn’t remember it, or much of her four delirious days in Becca’s spare room, kept hidden but alive. Apparently, just before Steph had arrived at the maisonette, Becca had been planning to alert the police to Freya’s whereabouts and then disappear. She was denying sending the note or the book. A question mark still hovered over those things.

Steph let Freya’s hair fall back into place. Then she opened her mouth and suddenly she was telling her daughter the story of a girl called Kate Thomas. A girl only a few months younger than Freya was now, who had thought she’d understood something, thought she could fix it. Much like Freya had.

It was a twisted bedtime story. Steph felt herself dividing as she told it, the same as when she’d first been interviewed by the police with her appropriate adult beside her. The version of herself that owned the whole truth was floating toward the attic ceiling, disappearing through the skylight with those extra pills in her fist. It was Kate, carrying away the snipped-out portion of the tale, leaving Steph on the bed with her daughter, sharing only as much as she could bring herself to confess. Only as much as she had told Paul.

Freya stared into space as she listened. Then her eyes moved to Steph. She looked calm, but her neck had reddened, like Becca’s did when her emotions were rising to the surface.

“You never even told Dad your real name?”

Steph shook her head. “I wanted to be Steph Harlow. And when I was with you and Dad, I was. You made me better. Helped me forget.”

“You killed someone.”

Steph swallowed. “Yes.”

“Did you mean to?”

Steph tensed. She’d never actually had to answer that question before. She thought of the adrenaline that had exploded through her as she’d snuck the additional dose into Nick’s drink. The thud of despair when she’d returned from Costcutter to find him unharmed. Later, when her mum had called from the hospital, the reality of what she’d done had ripped into her. But up to that point, deep down, had she wished him dead?

She met her daughter’s eyes, which seemed to brim with a kind of troubled fascination. Steph couldn’t let Freya think of her as a killer. She’d never really come to terms with the idea that her mum might have seen her that way, underneath their pretense.

“No,” she said. “I was scared and desperate. But of course I didn’t want to kill him.”