The bugs wouldn’t stop.

She needed to be sure.

She stripped off her clothes, unclipped her bra and ran her fingernails over her skin. She scratched the bugs away but more of them spawned, eggs rupturing, spreading, their legs crawling everywhere. She screamed and gouged them with her fingernails.

They couldn’t get to her mind. They’d make her remember the way his skull split open when the claw ruptured his forehead, the lipstick-red syrupy soup of his blood and brains. Or they’d make her think about all those nights, and the secret girlfriend, and the casual way he’d flaunt his abuse. She’d remember the iron, the sizzling against his worm; that wasn’t part of a delusion, was it? A dream within a dream?

She was weeping and screaming, and her skin was on fire. The more she scratched, the hotter the fire burned. It purified her skin and got rid of the bugs.

Harder, she stoked the flames, as the door flew open and officers rushed in.

52

SCOTT

Scott couldn’t believe he was sitting opposite Natalie’s girlfriend. Morgan was right there. She’d interjected at just the right moment; Scott had been dangerously close to sharing the truth with Gary, his defences down, his emotions raw.

Gary sat beside her, aggressively chewing gum. He hadn’t liked being bluntly told they had no right to speak Natalie’s name, and Scott bloody agreed. He’d suffered enough over lies about his marriage.

Morgan was explaining how she and Natalie met. “We were in the drama club together at school, then she started giving me these looks, and I did it back. We didn’t admit we were gay for ages, and then it was only to each other. But as we got older, she started getting more involved in her parents’ church. She got angry with me if I ever brought it up. But she still wanted to meet in secret.”

Scott stared in awe. This was his wife she was talking about, a stranger to him.

“I broke it off eventually. It was too much. But then she reached out to me one day on Facebook. I was single and thought, why not? I’m sorry, Scott.”

Morgan softened, and Scott shook his head. “We went to the hangman’s tree. That’s where we’d spent a lot of our time as kids. Back then, the council had let it grow, bushes and grass hiding… hiding whatever we wanted to do.”

“But you kept going back,” Gary said.

“Yes, we did. I guess it was a special place for us.”

Scott told her about the note. He had to force himself to remain quiet when she teared up. Already he was thinking about the connection between Natalie and Casey. The similarities, and what it said about him. He’d loved Natalie right until the end; he’d hate Casey for longer. He wished Natalie was here now.

“Then I met Lauren,” Morgan said, moving her finger around the rim of her coffee cup. “I told her our story. She googled you one night. We were drunk. She was making fun of your tie.”