And if things went too far, she could easily rein him in.

Taking his phone, she checked it wasn’t recording and then placed it on the table. “Great. Now you can get dinner started.”

He raised his eyebrow as he moved from the dining area to the kitchen. It was an open-plan space, but not small like the flat Casey had lived in before snagging Scott. It had a tall ceiling and a giant table and a big Aga oven. It was the sort of place a man could afford when he had his daddy’s inheritance to spunk away; if Casey had only wanted money from this wretch, she would’ve gutted the little prick the day he said I do.

“What am I making?” he asked.

“Turkish lamb dumplings. Do you remember the last time you made them?”

He winced. Good memories probably hurt him. They meant nothing to Casey. They’d never been good or bad. They’d all been a part of her plan, her one-year magnificent genius scheme. She was feeling good. A gorilla was gluing her bones together, easing any pain, there was a lemony taste to her thoughts, and a dog made of stars barked annoyingly in her mind, begging to have the constellations in its throat cut.

Scott was taking a very long time to respond. Or maybe it was the funny and interesting things happening to time. “I remember.”

“You were so excited to make it, like a little kid on Christmas Day. Then you ruined it and we had to order pizza. That was a wonderful night, wasn’t it?”

He did his annoying teeth-grinding thing. “Yeah, it was.”

“Well then.” She clapped her hands. “Better get started. I’ll be in the living room.”

She dropped onto the sofa and clicked play on her phone, the music filtering through the Bluetooth speakers. It was a pop mix, songs from when she was a teenager.

She’d run around her bedroom with a hairbrush in her hand, wondering if he would leave her alone today; she’d disappear into fantasies of being a pop star, crowds screaming her name. Every few minutes, she’d check the front window for her dad’s car, just in case. It would be time to turn the music down then.

As she listened, she looked over her adoring fans, all of them yelling, reaching out for her, desperate for a piece of her. She bobbed her head and opened her mouth, singing softly.

And then she thought about Scott, the real Scott. The phrase made her so tingly.

Real Scott.

There was a fake version of him, the one he pretended to be at school and with his friends and everybody else. Then there was the genuine version, the beast he hid from the rest of the world.

The issues. There were no issues. She was in the right. This was her prize. She’d worked for this.

Her thoughts were doing something annoying. They were fracturing, little vines pulling memories up from places best left forgotten. There was a long white sock with a bloody tooth sticking to the end of it, and a mug with a faded love heart on it, a crack down the middle, and somebody was yelling but their voice was a kiss and a tingle cut down her back and split her spine in two.