Bill was in the doorway, bags of shopping in his hands. He’d been gone when I came in from the hospital and forced myself to call my mother. He was always washing up, or cooking, or even doing laundry and making beds. As if he had to earn his place here, as if I wasn’t totally reliant on him already. I imagined what my mother would say about that – or what Karen would say, for that matter. I was being weak again. Replacing one man with another. And although it was nice, to have him do all this, it only made the house feel even less like my own. He did things differently, stacked the dishes in the wrong cupboards, bought the wrong brands of cleaning products. Everything had changed.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Did something happen at the hospital? Is Mike—?’

‘No. Well, he’s not good, but no change. The police came.’

‘Why?’

I searched Bill’s face, his dark eyes. I tried to think of a time he’d ever hurt me, or been cruel, or neglectful, or failed to consider me. I couldn’t. Bill would not have told the police about Martha. He wouldn’t do that, not to me. He’d promised me as much, because to tell the truth would be to bring me down as well, and I believed Bill would never do that, even though I hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years. No, it must have been Karen.

Bill was still watching me, the bags weighing heavy on him, and I wondered why he didn’t put them down. ‘Well, what happened?’

‘It’s Karen,’ I said. ‘She’s fighting back.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Five