‘I get it!’ Zannah flaps her hands. ‘So he starts acting like more of a stalker to Tilly and gets caught with her PJs in the garden deliberately.’
‘Yes. If he arranges it so that she “finds out”’ – I make air quotes with my fingers – ‘that he’s been stalking her, and then breaks down and sobs and says he loves her wildly, then his crap excuses are no longer suspicious. Suddenly, there’s an explanation that looks obvious.’
‘And it explains why he then stopped stalking her: because he never wanted to or really did in the first place. Wait: that only works if you’re right about Tilly first spotting him in his car on the street, not in her garden.’
‘I’m going to contact her and find out,’ I say. ‘I didn’t take her number, but I know she runs a business from 3, Wyddial Lane. Shouldn’t be hard to find.’
‘Another thing I just thought of,’ Zan says. ‘You know what Tilly said about none of the neighbours ever seeing Flora? What if that was deliberate? Lewis and Flora planned it so that no one saw her because they knew she’d be coming back as Jeanette Cater. They didn’t want the neighbours to say, “Wait, you’re not Jeanette, you’re Flora.”’
A shiver runs through my body. Pretending to be an obsessive stalker, hiding from the world so that you can come back with a different name … What can the Braids be so determined to hide that they’d go to such extremes? The more I know about the lengths they’ve gone to, the more convinced I am that the truth must be unbearable. For who, though? The Braids themselves, or for other people?
‘Did Georgina Braid have Lewis’s eyes like the other four?’ Zannah asks.
‘I don’t know. Don’t think I ever saw her with her eyes open. She was a tiny baby the only time they came round. Resemblances often don’t become obvious till you’re a bit older, anyway.’ Even in the photograph Flora sent with the Christmas card, Georgina had her eyes shut. The image of that tiny cutting lying on my kitchen floor flashes up in my mind. I push it away. ‘Why?’ I ask Zannah.
‘Dunno. I just wondered if she might have been Kevin and Yanina’s baby, not Lewis and Flora’s.’ Zannah laughs at my immediately alert expression. ‘Relax, Mum. That’s not a brilliant new theory. I don’t know why I said it.’
‘You wouldn’t have said it for no reason.’ If Flora was never pregnant with Georgina, then what I was annoyed about never happened: she didn’t fail to tell me that she was pregnant or that she’d had a baby – because she wasn’t, and she didn’t.
Zannah says, ‘Assuming you’re right about the eyes thing … which, okay, I believe you. Then little Thomas and Emily are Lewis and Flora’s, but everyone’s pretending they’re Kevin and Jeanette Cater’s. But there is no Jeanette Cater, not really, and Yanina lives in that house too, and she and Kevin might be together …’
‘And also might not be.’
‘It would be neat, though,’ Zan says. ‘A straight swap. Kevin and Yanina have Georgina and for some reason Flora and Lewis pretend she’s theirs. Then a few years later, Lewis and Flora have Thomas and Emily number two, and Kevin pretends they’re his.’
None of this strikes me as impossible or even unlikely, given all that’s happened and everything I know to be true. It would explain why Flora seemed distant and less interested in spending time with me in 2006, when she – or somebody – was pregnant with Georgina. If she knew she was about to have to tell the world the most outrageous lie and then sustain it, pretending that another woman’s baby was hers, there wouldn’t have been room in her mind or life for anything else. And … she wouldn’t have wanted her parents around her, either. They knew her better than anyone; they’d have been able to tell for sure that she wasn’t herself, that something was horribly wrong.
I was too wrapped up in what I thought was her rejection of me to worry about what might have been going on in her life. It’s unbearable to think that Thomas and Emily Cater might be suffering now because of my failure to realise twelve years ago that not everything was about me.
Flora’s suffering is more complicated. She has to be one of the main liars behind all this, whatever it is, but I’ve twice seen her behave