Epilogue #2
‘Olivia and I got on well at Kim’s birthday party.
We talked about school, about music, the stuff you talk to a thirteen-year-old about.
After that, I bumped into her in town a couple of times – once outside the newsagent, once near the park – and we chatted.
She’s a good kid. She’s bright and funny, and she trusts people, which is what makes this so unforgivable.
‘I’ve told her I’m planning a surprise for her mum.
A reunion at the old school, candles in the library, the whole thing.
I’ve told her it has to be secret, or it won’t work.
Her phone will be off – I’ve told her that’s part of it, that her mum checks her location and it would ruin the surprise.
She’ll be with me the whole time, warm and fed and looked after, however long it takes – as far as she’s concerned, the waiting’s all part of the game.
And she believes me, because why wouldn’t she?
She’s thirteen. She thinks adults tell the truth. ’
He stops. Presses his hands against his face. When he lowers them, his eyes are wet.
‘I’m going to talk to Kim about what happened in the past, show her the evidence, face to face, and ask her to stop. That’s all. I know she’ll say I kidnapped her daughter. I know she’ll say I’m dangerous. But I’ve run out of ways to make anyone listen, and I don’t know what else to do.’
The video ends. The screen goes black. I stare at my reflection in the glass – my face, my eyes, the bathroom behind me – and I wait for the shaking to stop.
It doesn’t stop.
I think about what he said. I think about the note – the one I told Alex was wrapped around a brick, the one I unfolded on the kitchen table with block capitals and black marker and the words YOUR CHILD’S LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.
The note the police have in an evidence bag.
The note that made Alex drive to the school with me and hide in the dark and tackle Ross into the bookshelves.
And I think about the other note. The one Ross posted through the cottage letter box after he’d tried the doors and given up. The one I found on the mat, written in Ross’s handwriting, quiet and desperate. The one that asked me to meet him, that brought Olivia into things.
The one I burned in the fireplace before I wrote my own. He’d put my daughter’s name on paper. He’d brought her into it, and he couldn’t get away with it.
Something rises in my chest – not guilt, not exactly, something older and colder, something I’ve been carrying since I was seventeen and Ross Mercer left me without a word.
I spent twenty years telling myself I was the one who’d been wronged.
I was the wronged one. I was the victim.
I was the girl who got left, and everything that came after – the messages, the accounts, the photograph, the note on the kitchen table, the brick I threw through my own window and blamed on a dead man – was justified.
Because he hurt me first. Because he left.
Because he chose someone else over me, and then he chose silence, and then he came back and chose decency over desire, and I couldn’t bear it.
I couldn’t bear being the woman Ross Mercer didn’t want, not again, not twice in one lifetime.
So I made sure he’d never get the chance to say so.
The email from Catherine says the story will be in the press by lunchtime.
She’s given them the video, the screenshots, the metadata.
She’s given them everything Ross left behind, and by the end of the day every person I know – Alex, my friends, Olivia’s school, the neighbours – will see the version of events I’ve spent six weeks burying.
I turn the shower off. I unlock the bathroom door. Alex is sitting on the edge of the bed, awake, his phone in his hand. He looks up at me, and I know from his face that Catherine has emailed him, too.
‘Kim,’ he says. ‘What is this?’
I open my mouth. The lies are right there – I can feel them queuing up, ready and practised, the same lies I’ve been telling for weeks, for months, for twenty years.
I could explain. I could reframe, soften, redirect.
I could cry and shake and say it’s been taken out of context, that Ross was manipulating the evidence, that his sister is grieving and angry and this is her revenge.
But Alex is glaring at me with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before, as if he is looking at someone he doesn’t recognise.
‘Alex—’
‘Is any of it true?’ he says. ‘What he says in the video. The messages. The accounts. The note.’ He pauses. ‘The brick.’
I don’t answer. The silence stretches between us, and it fills the bedroom the way it filled the cottage, the way it filled the years between Ross leaving and Ross coming back.
Silence is the thing I do. It’s the thing I’ve always done – when the truth is too ugly, when the story needs reshaping, when the version in my head is cleaner than the version that actually happened.
But silence won’t work this time.
Downstairs, the letter box rattles. The post, or a newspaper, or the first journalist. It doesn’t matter. It’s starting.
‘Kim.’ Alex’s voice is very quiet. ‘Answer me.’
I sit on the bed. I put my hands in my lap.
I glance at my husband – this decent, loyal, frightened man who killed someone to protect me, who has spent a month under investigation for something I set in motion, who is sitting on the edge of our bed at half past six in the morning waiting to find out whether his wife is the person he thought she was.
I open my mouth.
The bedroom door opens.
Olivia is standing in the doorway. She’s in her pyjamas, her phone in her hand, the screen glowing.
Her face is pale. Her eyes are wide. She looks from me to Alex and back again.
I can see that she’s been reading, or watching, or both, and her expression is the one I used to see in the mirror when I was seventeen and the world stopped making sense.
‘Mum,’ she says. ‘Mum, what did you do?’
The question fills the air around us. My daughter, my husband, and me. The three of us in this bedroom, in this house, in the life I built and broke and cannot rebuild with another lie.
I look at Olivia.
I don’t have an answer.