must be wondering when the hell I’m going to get to the point—to the reason I’m here, in this prison cell, and the reason I shouldn’t be.
And I promise you, it’s coming. But I can’t—I can’t seem to explain the situation quickly. That was the problem with Mr. Gates. He never let me explain properly—to show how it all built up, all the little things, all the sleepless nights and the loneliness and the isolation, and the craziness of the house and the cameras and everything else. To explain properly, I have to tell you how it happened. Day by day. Night by night. Piece by piece.
Only that sounds as if I’m building something—a house perhaps. Or a picture in a jigsaw. Piece by piece. And the truth is, it was the other way around. Piece by piece, I was being torn apart.
And the first piece was that night.
That first evening . . . well, it wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t the best either, not by a long stretch.
Petra woke up from her nap cranky and fretful, and Maddie and Ellie refused to come out of their room all afternoon, even for supper, no matter how much I pleaded, no matter what ultimatums I laid down. No pudding unless you are downstairs by the time I count from five . . . four . . . three . . . no sound of feet on the stairs . . . two . . . one and a half . . .
It was when I said one and a half that I knew I had lost.
They weren’t coming.
For a moment I thought about dragging them out. Ellie was small enough for me to grab her round the waist and carry her forcibly downstairs—but I had just enough sanity left to know that if I started that way, I would never be able to dial it back, and besides, it wasn’t Ellie who was the problem, it was Maddie, and she was eight and solidly built, and there was no way I could carry a kicking, screaming, fighting child down that long, curving staircase all by myself, still less, force her to sit down and eat something once I got her into the kitchen.
In the end I capitulated and, after checking Sandra’s suggested menu plan in the binder, I took pasta and pesto up to their bedroom—though the memory of those meek little heads bent over Jean McKenzie’s chocolate chip cookies was bitter in the back of my head as I knocked on the door and heard Maddie’s fierce Go away!
“It’s me,” I said meekly. “I’ve got your pasta. I’ll leave it here outside the door. But me and Petra will be downstairs having ice cream if you want some pudding.”
And then I left. It was all I could do.
Downstairs in the kitchen, I tried to stop Petra from throwing her pasta on the floor, and I watched Maddie and Ellie on the iPad. My personalized log-in gave me permission to view the cameras in the children’s room, playroom, kitchen, and outside, and to control the lights and the music in some of the other rooms, but there was a whole menu of settings on the left that was grayed out and unavailable. I guessed I would have needed Sandra’s log-in to control those.
Although I still found it a little creepy to be able to spy on the children from afar like this, I began to appreciate how useful it was. I was able to watch from my seat by the breakfast bar as Maddie moved towards the bedroom door and then came back into view of the cameras, dragging the tray of food across the carpet.
There was a little table in the middle of the room, and I watched as she directed Ellie to one seat and put out their bowls and cutlery, and sat opposite her sister. I didn’t have the sound on, but it was plain from her actions that she was bossing Ellie around and telling her to eat up . . . probably making her try the peas I had mixed into the pesto, judging by Ellie’s gestures as she protested. My heart gave a funny little clench, of angry pity mixed with a kind of affection. Oh, Maddie, I wanted to say. It doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to be enemies.
But for the moment at least, it seemed like we did.
After supper I bathed Petra, listening with half an ear to