side of the room, hoping she would get the message: there was no way he was about to let her out of his sight.
‘Turn her on her side.’ He repeated another instruction to Ryan, going across to the bed to make sure the baby was safe. ‘You need to put her in the recovery position.’
Ryan nodded shakily and eased his wife onto her side.
‘Do we know what she might have taken?’ Adam asked, feeling as desperate as the man looked.
‘No. There’s nothing here.’ Ryan’s gaze skimmed the bedside table as he straightened up. He was crying openly, wiping his tears against his shoulder.
‘Fuck!’ he said suddenly, and raced to the en suite. ‘Antidepressants,’ he shouted, swinging back into the room. ‘And sleeping tablets, it looks like. Fucking hell.’ His voice was wretched with fear as he stopped short of the bed, his chest heaving, the packets clutched in his hands.
Adam stayed with them until the ambulance arrived, keeping his gaze hard on Cassie, who sat mutely, her expression inscrutable as she gazed towards the window, where the rain lashed prophetically against the panes and the dark night beyond them was as bleak as his soul.
Fifty-Nine
Adam
‘Talk to me, Cassie,’ Adam begged, as Cassie sat silently in the passenger seat beside him.
She didn’t answer. Her gaze was fixed forwards, her expression closed.
Wearily Adam shook his head. She’d refused to go to the hospital, despite the cut to her forehead, which had obviously bled profusely, as well as the deep grazes on her cheek and the injury to her leg. Did she realise he was a millimetre away from calling 999 again? The ambulance wouldn’t be the service he required this time, though. Did she care? It was as if she was seeing and feeling nothing.
‘Where’s Kim?’ Fear settled like ice in the pit of his stomach. If Cassie had gone to the cottage, Kim would have run. Where was she now? Seeing the state Cassie was in, he was desperate to know she was safe. ‘Please talk to me, Cassie. Tell me where she is.’
Cassie looked at him at last, a frown crossing her face. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her,’ she said distractedly. ‘Why? Are you missing her?’
Hearing the sadness in her voice, Adam glanced down, pressed a thumb hard against his forehead. He’d been naïve. He shouldn’t have allowed the closeness she’d witnessed developing between him and Kim. He couldn’t undo it, but he wished she would believe that he’d never considered sleeping with another woman.
‘How did you know where Samuel was?’ he asked her, his throat tight.
Cassie looked at him guardedly. ‘Because of the text,’ she said.
Adam had seen the text. Ryan had found it on Jemma’s phone and shown it to him. A text sent to Kim, not Cassie. ‘The text on Kim’s phone?’ he checked, treading carefully.
‘Yes, the text on Kim’s phone.’ Cassie lowered her eyes, and Adam’s heart dropped like a stone.
‘How did you know about the text, Cassie?’ he asked, fear settling like ice in his chest as he replayed what she’d said when she’d found the so-called evidence of his infidelity in their bed. Evidence he now realised had been manufactured by Kim. My family is not dysfunctional! she’d screamed. I will not let anyone drag me down to their level, not you, not Josh, not anyone!
He’d felt the hairs rise on his skin as she’d said it. There’d been something in her look, a challenge, almost as if she was conveying that she was capable of doing whatever she had to in order to put a stop to what she imagined was going on. Was she capable?
She hadn’t been at home on the evening Josh had died, he recalled, hopelessness spreading through him. She’d been out on some work-related thing, returning home shortly before the police arrived.
‘How did you come by Kim’s phone if you haven’t seen her?’
Cassie looked stumped for a minute. He watched as she blinked rapidly, her eyes flooding with panic. ‘I went to the cottage,’ she blurted, as if seizing on an explanation. ‘The phone was there, in the kitchen. I… saw the mess, checked the phone instinctively.’ Lies. All lies, Adam knew it. ‘I was scared. I…’
So was Adam. He was terrified.
‘I thought that Ryan had been there,’ she stumbled on, looking anywhere but at him, her hand trembling as she pressed the back of it to her nose. ‘It was obvious there’d been an argument. I thought he might have lost his temper, that something might