I see at once, with pin-sharp clarity, that she will not relinquish the freedom she has, even though it is not rightfully hers. That she will never accept responsibility for what she started when she was twelve years old, and what Sara and I finished on her behalf because we loved her then, more than ourselves. That she has always been content to let others step up for her and shoulder the responsibility.

As true today as it was when we were children.

There’s another truth, too, evidenced in the flatness of her expression and the cook’s knife she is withdrawing from the bag on the floor.

To keep her secret, she will kill us both.

64

‘It’s too late,’ said Brinley, but Catherine heard the break in the journalist’s s voice which betrayed her fear. ‘Your sister has given a full account of who killed your parents. I’ve documented and corroborated it.’

Shannon shrugged, as if to say it won’t much matter when you’re dead.

Your sister . . .

Sara Carter. Catherine Allen. Which one was she? Catherine no longer knew. She’d waited so long to see her older sister again. To hear her voice and fall into her arms, to weep together for all they had lost. But this was not her sister. This was a stranger who wore her sister’s face. The sister she had loved with every part of herself had died in their childhood. This woman was monstrous.

Catherine – her middle name, pretty yet ordinary, had become her first name when she was eighteen, to help her weave the threads of her old self into her new identity – lay on her side on someone else’s bed, life leaking from her.

The clock moved on a minute. The hands blurred. Came into sharp focus. Blurred again. Her heartbeat slowed. No significance to the hour except, if she didn’t stop bleeding, it would mark her time of death, recorded on a certificate, filed in a register on a computer somewhere.

Honor’s face filled her heart. The corners of Catherine’s mouth twitched upwards. Such love, in spite of everything. A fierce, protective, motherly love. She might not live long enough to untangle the knot in the weft of their relationship, but it didn’t matter. All she had left was love. A sense she had, at last, done right by her daughter, whatever happened next.

‘Mummy,’ her little girl said, and her heart listened. ‘Mummy.’ She was holding Honor in her arms, the weight of her memory a ballast in this listing, unstable world.

A wave of pain threw her overboard.

Catherine opened her mouth to speak, but a bubble of spittle and blood burst against her lips. She tried to count. One. Two. But she couldn’t remember what came next. She was aware of a commotion between Brinley and her older sister, but in the detached manner of a distant observer with no hope of intervening.