Dedication

DEDICATION

For Dad

I miss you so bloody much

Epigraph

EPIGRAPH

‘Do you know who sank the boat?

Was it the little mouse,

the last to get in,

who was lightest of all?

Could it be him?’

— Pamela Allen

If Mimi had been asked if she was capable of taking a life,

she would have said, no. Never.

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Christmas Eve

Mimi

She had learned from a young age that it’s never like it is in the movies. For one thing, there’s no soundtrack. In a film, if something dramatic happens, or something horrific or frightening or desperately sad, the music will tell you how to feel. It will swell or thrum or thump. Violins might pierce your soul. A bass drum might crash around inside your ribcage. But the thing is, it changes the whole feel of it. You start to imagine that a terrible accident could be an exciting event. A chance to step in and save the day.

Whereas the truth of this type of situation is vastly different. When she was small, maybe seven years old, Mimi was at a restaurant with her family when a teenage girl at another table started choking. Most people will have seen somebody choking on television or in a movie, but they might never have seen it in real life. On the screen, it’s often comical. The person might be gesturing wildly, eyes bulging. Someone else doesn’t get what’s going on. A hero swoops in and expertly performs the Heimlich manoeuvre. A piece of chicken flies across the room. People applaud.

In real life, it doesn’t work that way.

The first thing Mimi noticed was the silence. She remembered she was blowing bubbles in her lemonade. The restaurant was noisy, chaotic. There might have been a shriek, or the clatter of a fork being dropped onto a plate, but she dismissed these as a normal part of the chaos. Then the hush fell. And from the silence, two or three panicked voices.

All around her, people seemed to have frozen in place. Her eyes were drawn to the table in the centre. A mother and father standing either side of their daughter. The daughter’s gaping mouth. Someone else, an older brother perhaps, leaping to his feet and his chair crashing to the floor. The noise of it landing made Mimi jump in her seat.