BooksBarbecue
Back What You Did
Chapters (44)
  1. TITLE PAGE
  2. COPYRIGHT PAGE
  3. CONTENTS
  4. PROLOGUE
  5. Chapter One
  6. Chapter Two
  7. Chapter Three
  8. Chapter Four
  9. Chapter Five
  10. Chapter Six
  11. Chapter Seven
  12. Chapter Eight
  13. Chapter Nine
  14. Chapter Ten
  15. Chapter Eleven
  16. Chapter Twelve
  17. Chapter Thirteen
  18. Chapter Fourteen
  19. Chapter Fifteen
  20. Chapter Sixteen
  21. Chapter Seventeen
  22. Chapter Eighteen
  23. Chapter Nineteen
  24. Chapter Twenty
  25. Chapter Twenty-One
  26. Chapter Twenty-Two
  27. Chapter Twenty-Three
  28. Chapter Twenty-Four
  29. Chapter Twenty-Five
  30. Chapter Twenty-Six
  31. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  32. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  33. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  34. Chapter Thirty
  35. Chapter Thirty-One
  36. Chapter Thirty-Two
  37. Chapter Thirty-Three
  38. Chapter Thirty-Four
  39. Chapter Thirty-Five
  40. Chapter Thirty-Six
  41. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  42. Epilogue
  43. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  44. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

We’d have laughed at that, once. ‘I’m trying to keep your son from years in prison.’ As if her son was all Jake was to me, as if I hadn’t practically raised him when he was a child. ‘And to stop Mike dying. If he dies he won’t go on trial. Is that what you want?’

‘He might get off anyway.’ She toyed with her cigarette. ‘It’s only my word it wasn’t consensual. And the prior . . . relationship. The police seem to know all about that, not to mention my previous boyfriends.’ I said nothing. ‘I need someone to say they saw what happened. Or he confessed to them. Someone who spoke to him right after.’

She’d explained it as if to a child, but there was no need. I knew what she wanted as soon as she started talking. I’d forgotten how clever she was. How she’d powered through Oxford barely even trying, which was why her failed degree was such a shock. ‘I didn’t see it. You know that. I’d have . . . you know I’d have said.’

She didn’t say: do I? But I heard it in the air between us. ‘I need to be believed, Ali. If this doesn’t work . . . if those people in court say I lied or they don’t believe me or that maybe I wanted it . . . it will kill me. I really think it will kill me. I can’t sleep, I’m all alone here. Every time there’s a noise outside or downstairs I find myself standing in the middle of the floor, and the adrenaline, it’s drowning me, like I literally can’t get a breath in and it feels like I’m going to die.’

‘A panic attack.’ The women in the refuge often had them.

‘Yes. You know, sometimes I even ask myself – well, we did it before, so could it really be that bad if I didn’t want it this time? Could it really make so much of a difference that I can’t sleep, can’t eat? I tell myself to pull it together. Is it really worth all this, you hating me and Jakey in there and Mike . . . but I can’t help it, because this is the truth and this is how I feel. It is different. It’s the difference between hugging me and choking me. I can’t explain it but until you’ve been held down like that . . . until you know how weak you are as a woman, how helpless, you’ll never understand.’