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Back The Family Next Door Save as PDF
Chapters (117)
  1. Also by
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Epigraph
  5. PROLOGUE
  6. 1
  7. 2
  8. 3
  9. 4
  10. 5
  11. 6
  12. 7
  13. 8
  14. 9
  15. 10
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  30. 25
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  32. 27
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  114. 109
  115. 110
  116. Teaser chapter
  117. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The years rolled around and we could not stop them. When Birdie had still not returned, as I knew she would not, I applied for—and was awarded—a declaration of presumed death. At the age of twenty-five, I had my own home and business.

In the beginning, you asked questions about my “mother.” I drip-fed you snippets. About the hand-painted watch with the sharp-edged face she was wearing when she vanished. Ticktock, ticktock. Her love of violet creams.

But I did not tell you about the scars between my shoulder blades and on the inside of my wrist. I would not lie, but it would have been unfair to clog your feelings with undeserved sorrow for me. I have always despised pity. Those who seek it. And those who confer it upon the shoulders of others.

Even now, with the wail of the sirens, I do not require pity. My decisions have always been clearheaded and I make them with my eyes open. Parental relationships are complex. Imperfect. Filled with love and hate and duty and guilt.

Two people remembered the truth about Birdie, and neither of us was telling.

Until that telephone call eight months ago. It signed the death warrants of us all.

23

23

Monday 30th July 2018, 2:13 P.M.

25 The Avenue

As soon as Evan had scrambled down the tree house ladder, Olivia Lockwood had grabbed his arm and hauled him up the garden. As she’d marched him into the kitchen, the boy had stumbled over the lip of the back door and grazed his shin.

He’d cried out, but she’d suspected it was from humiliation rather than pain. She had snapped her standard response. Same as her mother’s. “If you’d done as I’d asked in the first place, you wouldn’t have got hurt.”

Sometimes she despised herself.

Evan was now sitting on the sofa, knees pulled up to his chin, socks down to his ankles, playing his Nintendo Switch. He’d forgotten all about the hurt, his attention focused on his game.

In a concession to “spending time” with her family, Olivia had carried her laptop from the study to the sitting room. She was supposed to be concentrating on a press release she was drafting for a client but she couldn’t stop looking at that graze, the way his skin had broken open in a dozen rubied wounds.

Sometimes her anger scared her.

When she had found Evan in that tree house, she had wanted to strike him, to make his disobedience sting. To reduce him and see him cower. She had never smacked her children, but that didn’t mean the impulse was not there. The red marks on his arm were testament to that.

And she wasn’t naïve enough to believe that violence was always physical. Words could bruise. Contempt could crush. Amplifying her voice until it drowned out all others was a type of brutality of its own.