It took a few minutes for Eddie to click on various screens, turn on the ancient printer, turn it off again when it failed to work, turn it back on. I almost screamed. Didn’t he know what was at stake? Finally, I had a stack of printouts, everything that had been spent from our bank accounts since I lost my husband. Because I knew him. I knew he wouldn’t be able to live off whatever cash he’d siphoned over the years. There would always be the temptation to spend a little more, probably on some woman. And he knew I never looked at the accounts, that I wasn’t good with technology or forms, and that Eddie was less than vigilant. He might think it worth the risk.

My eyes devoured the sheet of tiny figures. I knew I would find something, in among all the dozens of tiny expenditures I had made myself. Food, petrol, the move. And eventually, at the bottom of the tenth page I scoured, there it was.

‘Elle?’ Eddie sounded worried. ‘Is everything alright?’

I felt the edge of the desk under my hand, and I felt the rest of my doubts collapse and fall away, taking with them Elle, Eleanor Sullivan, Elle-belle. The wife he’d duped over and over. Who he’d left to cry at his grave, which didn’t even have him in it.

‘I’m fine.’ I found my voice, and with it my rock-bottom. Everything I had known, everything I’d built my life on was a lie. I had not known my husband at all. I had not known anything.

But that’s the thing about rock-bottom. It gives you something firm to put your feet on, at last. I looked again at the printout, the figures fuzzy before my eyes. A euro transaction. A bar somewhere in Spain. The Red Lion. An English pub – really? Not even a large amount. In pounds, it came to nine forty-eight. And for a moment I was almost disappointed, that he had pulled off such an audacious plan, then ruined it all for the sake of so little.

Suzi

Suzi

It was snowing again outside the cottage. Coming down silent and stealthy over my poor dead plants, bringing with it grown-up anxieties about food, frozen pipes, being trapped out here, instead of innocent childish joy in sledging and snowballs. The windscreen wipers on Dr Holt’s jeep were working overtime as he pulled up near Willow Cottage. ‘You’re sure this is OK?’

‘Yeah, it’s not far.’ In truth, the walk down the lane was far enough in the snow, while pregnant, but I couldn’t risk being seen by Nick.

Dr Holt seemed reluctant to let me go. ‘Suzi, think about this. We know she’s dangerous – that she’d hurt a child. Is going back home really wise?’