Perhaps stories would have been sufficient if a new student hadn’t joined our class when I was almost nine. She was small, mousy, nothing special, although she was adopted, which caused a few minutes of staring as if being such meant she had to look different in some way. When she didn’t, we went back to ignoring her. Things wouldn’t have changed if I hadn’t walked out after school that first day to see her mother waiting for her with open arms. There was a beaming smile and a look of love on her face as she folded the mousy girl in her embrace as if she was the most precious thing in the world. Jealousy was a new emotion for me; it brought me to a halt, my eyes fixed on the scene, wanting desperately to be that girl, to have that woman as my mother, to have the life I knew I should have been born into.

The girl, Monica, became my obsession. Never a friend, though; losers like me, girls who didn’t have lunch, who never invited classmates to birthday parties, who were dressed in charity-shop cast-offs, who were obviously ‘different’, didn’t have friends. Even then, I knew my place. But I watched. I followed Monica and her mother home, stood outside their house for hours at a time and followed their comings and goings. Perhaps I wanted to see that the reality of their life was no different to mine, that the school greeting was merely for show, but no, they appeared happy, content, loved-up, every single time I saw them.

My envy grew. Especially when I had to go home after seeing them together, when I was forced to contrast their idyllic life with mine.

Why couldn’t I have been adopted into a loving family? That thought began to obsess me until finally I realised that I could be.

If my parents were to die.

5

Peter took Allison to a wine bar a short distance away. The clientele older, smarter, richer. The décor sumptuous. Damask chairs, polished wood, the light dim and flattering.

‘This is better.’ He brushed away the menu the waiter held out to him. ‘A bottle of Dom Perignon, please.’

‘Certainly.’

Allison bit back a sigh of pleasure as she sat on a chair so comfortable it was like being hugged. She was being swept along; it wasn’t a sensation she was used to. ‘You didn’t ask if I liked champagne.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes, but that isn’t the point.’ She tried to put a little steel in her voice. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

He laughed then, the confident, self-assured sound of a man who always got his own way. ‘Peter… Peter Fellowes. Are you happier drinking champagne with me now?’

Once again, she wanted to dazzle him with her witty repartee. ‘Safer, perhaps.’ Safer, perhaps. That was the best she could come up with?