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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 think we understand love – that it’s simple, like a warm bath. That it’s inherently a good thing, positive, a sign that we are decent people. I love my kids, say angry women on TV, as if they expect a pat on the back for obeying biology. I had known these facts for a long time – that I loved Cassie, and Benji. I loved Mike. And I loved Karen, like a sister, the way I hadn’t been able to love my own family. But what we don’t understand is that love can turn on a dime. We don’t know how easy it is to feel it flip over to a dark side, cold and dead, like the moon spinning on its axis. I looked down at the list I’d made, scrawled in blue ink on the back of Mike’s hospital notes. Lies. Booze. Shagging around. There was so much I could add to that one. The married man – the other married man – she was carrying on with for two years, the one who shagged her in his office after hours, leaning on the window in the boardroom looking over Canary Wharf. God. Was that Mike? Would she do that to me, tell me stories of my own husband, just to watch me try to be OK with the cheating? I was so uncool compared to her. Yes, I believed she would do that. I believed anything of Karen, now.

I stared down at the list, noting where the pen had scored right through the paper, realising how unhinged it made me seem. Would I really do this? What was the alternative? The alternative was waiting until I saw her in court, and grabbing her by the ratty ends of her hair, and swinging her head against the glass walls of the building until I heard a crack, and the glass was smeared with red. I had to destroy Karen, one way or the other. And I didn’t kid myself. The only reason I wasn’t doing it that way was this: Benji and Cassie didn’t need both parents going to jail.

A text shook my phone in my pocket. I took it out – a message from Adam Devine. Jake had been denied bail and was being remanded in youth custody. Finally, something going my way. I thought how very far we had travelled, when my way was this.

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

‘Still no baby then?’