I couldn’t stop glancing at the scratches high on my husband’s right cheek, three small vertical lines of angry red, close together, from his temple to his ear. He’d said he’d fallen, been scratched by a thorn bush amidst the smoke and chaos while searching for our children. But they didn’t look consistent with that kind of injury to me – they were too regular, too uniform. Too straight.

They looked like fingernail marks.

An ugly, twisted thought came crawling right after it: Izzy was left-handed. A left-handed person would lash out on the right side of an attacker’s face . . .

After the fire started, Sean was in the woods the longest. On his own. He went back in on his own. He came out on his own. I didn’t see what he was doing. No one did. So no one saw how he got those injuries.

Perhaps he hadn’t been on his own the whole time.

The logical part of my brain laid out a horribly plausible scenario, displaying it like a reel of found footage. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get rid of it. Couldn’t turn the projector off. Every time I tried, it just came back louder and brighter and more convincing than before: Jake and Ethan, angry that they had to fly home early, messing around with matches in the woods, accidentally starting fires not in one place but in two. That was why my first view of the fire had struck me – because it was not just in one spot. Two separate fires, thirty feet apart. Perhaps a competition between teenage brothers, to see who could get flames going the quickest? And then panicking when it spread, running away and leaving it to burn. In among the smoke and chaos, Sean finds Izzy out by the bluff. Or she finds him. A chance meeting, and their lovers’ argument is reignited – she wants to get their affair out in the open; he is desperate to keep it a secret. Passions are high and tempers flare, things get out of hand. She had always been feisty but he is almost a foot taller than her and so much stronger. She makes an ultimatum: perhaps she lashes out and he is just defending himself, perhaps he doesn’t realise they’re dangerously close to the edge of the cliff and then—

All of a sudden I can’t stand him touching me.

The scenario plays on a loop in my head, a grimly credible montage of images that becomes more and more real, the longer I think about it. The hairs on the backs of my arms rise.

What have you done, Sean?

My God, what have you done?

Chapter 72

72