The blue lights of the police cars filled the room. And I knew they had come for me.

We seemed paralysed, Christian and I, too frightened to move as we waited for the knock at the door.

When it came – the gentle rap of knuckles on wood, perversely ignoring the doorbell – I was the first to react.

‘I’ll get it,’ I said. And then I stopped. ‘Christian?’

‘What?’

‘I mean it, you know. I really do. I love you.’

‘But what do you think they want?’

‘Say it again.’

‘Love you too,’ he said, but he was distracted now, and worried, and scared, and he still didn’t know, and he still didn’t suspect that everything was about to come crashing down.

There were two policemen at the door. A young female officer and an older man, too old to still be in uniform. The sergeant who was here once before.

But they had not come for me.

‘Mrs Carver, is it?’ the old cop said, as if there might be some doubt about my marital status. ‘We’re here for your husband.’

HAVING

16

Tara

‘The bitch is still there,’ Mary said, staring out into the bright early morning, taking an angry bite out of her apricot croissant.

We huddled inside the smoked glass doors of Angel Eyes, watching the woman who haunted the only way in and out of our mews.

‘Bloody journalists,’ Mary said.

‘But – the thing is – she doesn’t look like a journalist,’ Skyla said.

Our young intern was right.

The woman keeping guard at the end of our mews looked too old and too rich to be a journalist. She was a tall, lean fifty-something in a neat Chanel suit with a Stella McCartney bag and a phone the size of a dinner plate. All the journalists I had ever known looked young and poor. I rubbed my eyes, sticky from a sleepless night spent staring at my phone for messages that never came – from Christian, from Ginger, from the police, from anyone who would tell me that the world was unchanged. I had walked the dog before Marlon was awake, and then taken him to school in a kind of fever, nauseous with exhaustion and fear, terrified that Christian must know by now what I had done, and all the while my heart was aching with the knowledge that he would never look at me in the same way ever again.

I was also worried sick that the police actually believed he had something to do with the death of James Caine.

Why the hell else would they come for him?

I had got to work early and my staff were already there with multiple messages to call the same persistent journalist. Mary, Skyla and Michael had convinced each other that this journalist wanted to write some kind of ‘My Dating App Hell’ feature on Angel Eyes, pegged to the Accidental Dater’s latest courting misery. If only! I knew – I just knew – that the woman at the end of our mews was there because of Christian’s arrest. She wasn’t there because my business was falling apart. She was there because my life was falling apart.