‘She was in the way,’ Ethan cries. ‘It’s your fault. All that time you were spending with her.’

Laura lets out a sob. ‘You did kill her?’ she asks, almost plaintively, as if until that moment she hadn’t been sure. Now, faced with the confirmation, her agony is writ clear across her face. But then the grief twists into something new; into anger. ‘She was my mum! She’d been ill!’ Laura shouts. ‘She needed me!’

‘I needed you,’ Ethan says, still clutching his leg, the pain eating his face.

He looks between us, seeming to realise that neither of us are going to help him and that there’s every chance we might leave him here like this.

‘You won’t get away with this,’ he says, fear flooding his face.

Laura wipes her hand across her face, drying her tears. ‘Yes, we will,’ she replies with a smile.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Laura

Two Months Earlier

I’m standing at the sink, peeling carrots, when I feel the strange sensation that I’m being watched. I’ve been feeling it a lot recently, and I’ve even started to wonder if it’s my mother’s ghost, watching over me. But when I look up, I see a woman, dressed all in black, despite the warm summer sun, standing still as a statue by the far fence.

We back onto an alley. She must have jumped over. I don’t scream when I see her though – that instinct has been beaten out of me – but my heart rate doubles, and I grip the knife I’m holding tighter.

The woman beckons to me. I stand there, frozen. But she beckons again. Finally, I move to the back door, as though in a trance. If it was a man outside I would call the police, but the fact she’s a woman reassures me. Isis is at my heel and when I open the door, instead of barking as she normally does at the sight of a stranger, she races across the garden towards the woman, her tail wagging furiously. She jumps up in delight, licking her face, and the woman pets her, smiling ear to ear, tears falling.

It’s only then I remember the security camera that Liam installed. I glance up at it. It’s pointed at the back door, not at the garden. If he’s watching via the app on his phone, which goes off any time someone approaches the door, he will see me going outside. But he won’t see where I go in the garden.

I walk towards the woman. She smiles at me. ‘Hi,’ she says. Though her words are warm, there’s a hardness to her.

I shake my head, terror gripping me that Liam might return at any moment and find her there. I’ll get into trouble. ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask in a whisper. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Mia,’ she says.