outdoor lamp switched on, flooding the back garden with light.
The figure had disappeared.
Melissa wrapped her arms around herself. She looked at the dregs of her cider. She’d had three glasses. Maybe she was just seeing things? The last batch of cider she’d made and given to Rosemary and Bill was pretty potent. She checked the back door was locked anyway after the three dogs came in, all the other doors too, then walked upstairs.
She got ready, slightly unsteady on her feet, and slipped into bed. But once again, she couldn’t sleep. She was so used to Patrick being beside her as she slept she simply couldn’t shrug off his absence. Now her mind was filled with his infidelities, his lies and his secrets.
She felt like she had all those years ago after Joel died. She’d overheard her mum once describing tough times as like trying to walk up a muddy hill, doing your best to make progress, but you just kept slipping down, grabbing clumps of mud as you did and making it even harder until, in the end, you just slid down, down, down.
Melissa eventually fell asleep with the image of her mother in her mind, her long white hair and kind blue eyes.
But then she was woken again by the sound of breaking glass.
‘Mum?’ Grace’s scared voice called out. ‘What was that?’
Melissa jumped out of bed and ran on to the landing to see Grace watching her from the open door of the attic room above, bleary-eyed. As always, Lilly was sleeping through it, able to switch her mind off just like that.
Lewis shoved past his sister. ‘I’ll go and check,’ he said.
Melissa put her hand on his chest, stopping him. ‘No, wait here.’
‘But Mum . . .’
‘I can handle it, Lewis. I’m not as fragile as you think.’
She turned on the landing light and walked tentatively downstairs towards Rosemary and Bill’s moonlit kitchen, catching glimpses of jagged glass on the floor. She quickly turned the lights on, letting out a gasp when she saw that the back window had been smashed to smithereens. Lying on the floor among the glass was a brick. She stepped around the glass and picked it up, realising with horror that it was wrapped in one of the posters she’d found the week before. She turned it around in her shaking hands, noticing that Lewis’s face in the family photograph was circled in red pen with the words DAD KILLER scrawled above it.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Thursday 25th April, 2019
1.24 a.m.
It feels like it’s the night of what happened with Dad again in Nan and Grandad’s attic room, cowering under the covers, terrified. Except I’m even more scared now. At least I knew the monster under the bed last week. It was me.
But now there’s a new monster and Mum’s scared, really scared.
Why would someone do that, throw a brick through Nan and Grandad’s window?
There was something wrapped around it but Mum wouldn’t let us see it. She shouted at us to go back in our room so we did, because seriously, when she raises her voice like that, we know she means business. It must have been bad, though, really bad, because why’d she not show us? Plus, she was all trembly and quiet.
I remember another time she was like this, after Joel died. Going into herself. Or down a tunnel. That was how Kitty Fletcher described it. Alice falling down that rabbit hole.
She didn’t call the police. Instead, she called Grandad at the hospital, talking to him in this weird monotone voice. When he turned up with Tommy Mileham, Mum went with them into the living room and they all shut the door, whispering whispering whispering. That’s when I saw the photo albums on the kitchen table, and all those old photos of Joel. Mum must have been looking at them before she went to bed. It’s like she’s trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, and she’s close, so close.
Will she finally slot all the pieces into place? And what then?
The three of us talked into the night last night. We talked about finally telling Mum everything. It’s crazy in a way: after putting soooo much energy and sleepless nights into not telling her, we were beginning to wonder whether we should.
But then we decided not to, for the same reasons we kept it from her in the first place: we might lose one parent; we don’t want to lose another.
But maybe she’ll figure it out before we get the