Now Conway was dead, and Patrick’s crime had gone with him. No one else would ever think to look for my husband, or know he might be alive out there somewhere. But I knew. And wherever he was – he would not have lingered in Spain, surely, not when he could take a ferry from there to North Africa and vanish – I wished there was a way to let him know that I was going to come after him, Lady Vengeance herself, and he was not going to get away with it.

Do you hear me, Patrick-Sean-whatever-you’re-calling yourself now? You will not get away with this.

Among all the lies, his death, his affair, his resurrection, that was the one thing I clung to. He would pay for what he’d done.

In fact, I was already on his trail.

Suzi

Suzi

At times of stress when I was a kid – exams, getting in trouble with Mum for poor marks at school, being caught shoplifting fruit gums that one time at the age of eight – I would sometimes imagine a sassy friend giving me advice, the kind you saw on American sitcoms. Right now, she was lecturing me, hands on her hips. Heck, girl, what’s the matter with you? Your husband has you locked in a music room! I mean, let’s not even talk about why you have a music room in the first place.

It was so hard to take in. For a long time, after I’d woken up down there, my arm crumpled under me painfully, a bruise on my forehead, I hadn’t been able to believe it. Was it some mistake? Did Nick know I was here? My brain rejected the truth. Of course he did – not only had he put me here, he had planned this. It was all him – the lights, the music, the word in the snow, even the rabbit. He’d admitted the lot. Not Nora at all – I had no idea what she was up to, but it wasn’t her trying to send me insane. It was my husband. Looking back, I was amazed I’d never noticed the signs. My phone, always drained of battery from the spyware he’d put on it. The way he always knew where I’d been, what I’d done. So stupid.