been hiding in plain sight in Bristol, he had planned it all. He hadn’t told me why, not yet – he said he’d come to that later. But he’d told me how. How he’d planned it all for ages, worked out exactly how to do it, and how to do it perfectly, and how Quinn, who knew everything after all, had helped him. Helped him stage his own death. The blood. Cleaning our house with bleach to make it look like he’d barely been there. Making sure I didn’t see that he was using a strange, foreign bank card when he paid for things, using the cash he’d stashed away as often as he could. Squirreling money away for his future. Finding out the locations of all the CCTV cameras in Bristol and choosing our new house because it was in a location where he knew there were none. Deleting all my recent photos of him and emails from him from my phone. Pulling out of his new job in Bristol, and instead spending his days at the gym, hiding away. I’d been right about that too, but the plan, all of it, the whole incredible, organized plan which had worked so well, so brilliantly, stunned me. He’d known, too, that the police would suspect me of attacking him. He’d hoped they’d suspect me. He’d even confessed, almost as an afterthought, that he’d been repeatedly unfaithful throughout our marriage, ‘addicted’ to sex with other women, sneaking off for regular hook-ups with people he’d met online, when I thought he was working late or off on one of his solitary bike rides. With each new revelation came an apology, an expression of regret at what he had put me through, but I barely heard his remorseful words, the scale of his deception hitting me with such force that I felt as if I was being physically attacked, my chest so tight I was struggling to catch my breath, waves of nausea washing over me. If it hadn’t been my life, if I’d read about it in a newspaper, I would have thought someone had made it up. But it was my life, and I felt yet again as if somebody had just thrown a bomb into it and blown it into a million pieces.
‘So go on, Danny. Why, for God’s sake? You’ve told me how you did it, now tell me why. Why did you have to run, to pretend you were dead? What can have been so bad, that you had to do that? That you had to frame me, for your murder? Me, your wife?’
My voice was shaking. If, over the past few horrible weeks, I’d ever dared to allow myself to imagine this day, the day when Danny would be home, safe and well, I’d never imagined it like this. Never imagined that the man I loved so much could treat me like this, use me, deliberately put me in such a terrible situation. I’d been suspected of being a serial killer, for fuck’s sake, and it was all down to him. I stared at him, waiting for him to explain, to tell me why, my heart thudding dully in my chest, and I realized with sudden, awful clarity what I had suspected for a while; that I had never known this man at all. This man who I had vowed to spend my life with, for better or for worse. This man who had made the same vows to me. It had been a lie, every single tiny bit of it, and although I had wondered about that in the dark days of the past few weeks, now it was real, and I was reeling. In fact, no, not reeling – reeling was too small a word for what I was feeling. Reeling sounded kind of fun, a gentle, dizzying spin across a dancefloor, maybe. What I was actually feeling was as if my world was spinning wildly, completely out of control, at sickening, breakneck speed, and with no return to normality ever possible. How did you recover from something like this? How would that ever be possible?
‘I do love you, you know.’
I jumped. He’d started talking again, my husband, looking at me with those beautiful, chocolate brown eyes, and I tried to drag my attention back to him, away from my own anguish, away from the edge of the abyss I was sinking into, the dark, deep place I knew I would plunge into fully as