You were guilty right from the start at that place.

That’s the one who shagged that murdered guy.

And that’s the husband who they thought did it.

It turns out it was some mad homeless squaddie with PTSD.

‘He scares me, Christian,’ Tara said. ‘That policeman. Stoner. He scares the daylights out of me.’

I did not reply. I did not know what to say to her any more. I was afraid that anything I said might open up wounds that would never heal.

Wounds in her, wounds in me. So I kept my mouth shut.

‘Stoner thinks we’re involved in this, Christian. You and me. Maybe he thinks we did it together? Maybe he thinks we hired that poor one-armed bastard they’ve got locked up. I don’t know what he thinks but I do know he doesn’t care if our family comes apart. He doesn’t care about Marlon. Christian? Please. We have to stick together now. Because if we don’t, then they’re going to take everything away from us. We can’t let that happen.’

And I stared at the school where the bell would ring soon and I pondered the final mystery of all couples.

Are you enough for me?

And am I enough for you?

It was not such a mystery any more for us.

We knew, didn’t we?

Tara was fighting back the tears now. And I was aware that mothers were looking at her differently now, and that fathers were looking at her too, in a way they had not looked at her before.

As if Tara was an option now. As if she was available.

The bell rang and Marlon appeared, just one face in a sea of faces, but the face that held my heart, the face that felt like the centre of the universe, and my reason for living, and the loveliest face in the world.

Buddy began to bark wildly.

Our beautiful boy smiled and waved and began running towards us.

I took Tara’s hand in mine.

‘He scares me too,’ I whispered.

27

Tara

‘Sorry,’ I told Sophie Sherman, ‘but I can’t do this.’

After a sleepless night thinking about what it would mean to really share my story with the world, I found my feet were stone cold. The interview with DCI Stoner had badly shaken me and I had no appetite at all for the scrutiny that would come with facing the press. But Sophie Sherman was not listening to me. It was early afternoon and she had no time for anyone’s cold feet as she watched the assorted journalists, photographers, bloggers, podcasters, broadcasters and cameramen cramming into the Angel Eyes office, chatting happily among themselves, getting the light right on the faces of the three women who had already taken their place behind a table at the end of our open-plan office.

And as I watched them – the three women waiting to tell their stories of horror at the hands of James Caine, the indifferent media pack preparing for the latest breaking news of sexual abuse, and Mary, Skyla and Michael looking bewildered at what our once happy place of work had come to – I knew that I wanted no part of it. I didn’t want the attention and, try as I might, I could not muster the self-pity. Because as much as I hoped that James Caine was burning in hell right now, I did not feel like his victim. He was dead, wasn’t he? Somebody had given him exactly what he deserved, hadn’t they? He had died and I lived. And to be frank, I was expecting a bigger turn-out of victims. I had imagined that there would be an army of women who had been tormented by James Caine, that we would find strength, and some sweet anonymity, in our numbers. Listening to Sophie Sherman, I had assumed that I would look like one among the many women that Caine had tortured. But it wasn’t like that.