I shake my head, terrified. ‘I don’t know. If he finds out …’

She grips my arm tight and looks into my eyes. She’s blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful despite the scar running down her cheek and the dark circles under her eyes. ‘Do you want to get away from him?’

I nod, tears welling up. ‘But I can’t.’

‘I know you’re scared,’ she says. ‘I know what he’s capable of.’ Pain is etched on her features. ‘But you’re going to get away from him. And then we’re going to make him pay for what he’s done. Do you understand?’

The fierceness in her voice stirs a dormant part of me that I thought had vanished for good. I nod and she turns to leave, walking towards the fence at the back of the garden. I want to ask her a thousand things – how did she find us? What does she know about Liam and the things he’s done to me? How long has she been watching? What’s her plan? But the question I ask is: ‘Do you promise?’

She stops and looks over her shoulder. ‘That I’ll get you out of this?’

I shake my head. ‘That we’ll make him pay.’

Chapter Thirty-Four

Laura

‘Laura,’ Liam begs, his voice sounding weaker, the blood leaking out of him onto the muddy ground, washed away by the rain.

I look down on him, feeling no sympathy and no regret. I don’t even feel bad to see him in pain. If it was a fox caught in the trap, I would feel something, I would cry, but with Liam I am only relieved. His eyes search my face. He can’t believe I’ve betrayed him.

But I have. I’ve lied to him. I’ve lied to everyone. Like Liam, I became an actor, better than him even, because I knew what the consequences were if I failed. Every smile, every touch, every gesture of kindness or tenderness has been pretend.

I have feigned being in love with him, faked being the perfect, adoring wife, for every second that we’ve been here. And there is some triumph in that. In knowing that I have tricked him just like he tricked me. Every time he touched me, I would shudder, and he took it for pleasure, when really it was revulsion. Every time he held my hand, I had to fight not to yank it out of his grip. Every time he kissed me, I had to kiss him back as though I meant it. I have learned to contain my terror and my grief and my hatred; to mask them behind a smile.

I have had to hide my innermost thoughts from everyone, even from myself. I have kept them locked away in a far recess of my mind, so they would never reveal themselves, accidentally slipping out and tracing a path across my face that he might notice. I have forced the real me into hiding.