The Happy Family by Jackie Kabler (electric book reader txt) 📕

not bringing them home. I’ll take a couple of weeks off work and you need to sort yourself out, OK? This can’t go on. Get your shit together, Beth. Act like a proper mother, or they’ll be living with me permanently, OK?’

‘Jacob, no! Please, let’s talk about this—’

But the line’s gone dead. I stare at the handset for a moment, horrified, then fling it on the bed and start to sob.

Not the children, please …

BRRRR.

The phone’s ringing again. This time the display says Holly Tree, and my hand’s already started to shake as I accept the call.

‘Mrs Holland? It’s Anya, at Holly Tree. I just need to ask, did you post something on our Facebook page? Some … well, footage?’

And the calls keep on coming.

‘Mrs Holland? It’s Rachel from Pitt Lane Primary School …’

‘Is that Beth? Hi, my name’s Sarah and I work with Brenda Welch, you know, your next-door neighbour, at Evolution boutique in Suffolk Road? She’s just checked the shop’s Facebook page …’

I try to explain it to all of them, denying any knowledge, telling them someone’s clearly hacked my account, apologising anyway, and begging them not to click on the link, to delete the posts. When the calls finally stop I’m exhausted, limp, but I stay in my room, ignoring Mum’s pleas to come downstairs and have something to eat. I can’t bear it. I have visions of Jacob, and Finley and Eloise’s teachers (and oh God, my dad, could my dad have seen it?), and Brenda and her staff, and everyone else, all watching that video, seeing me like that, naked and exposed. I have to find out what’s happened here, I have to, so I search the room again, every little bit of it this time. I search the bathroom too, running my hands increasingly frantically over every inch of the walls, the pictures, the furniture, and still I find nothing, nothing. I slump to the floor and sit for a long time after that, my head in my hands, my nails clawing at my scalp.

I need to get the room swept. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? I think. I look it up and find a bug-sweeping service based in west London, a company that can send someone up here as soon as Tuesday. It’s going to cost me hundreds of pounds but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything right now other than stopping this, whatever it is. Stopping it and getting my children back. My brain is whirring. The name Daphne Blake is still niggling me. Something about it is triggering some distant memory but it’s still too faint, too vague, just a whisper, and I push my fists into my eye sockets, trying to make myself think, think. Who would do this? Who?

The face outside the lounge window floats back into my mind. Could whoever that was have been here before, have broken in somehow and planted the cameras? And then I think about Mike, the private detective, and I wonder about him too. Was it him, hanging around long after he should have been, after all? Was it him talking to my friends, pretending to be a runner, a gardener, a plumber, or was that all, as I’d finally started to believe, in my imagination? Does he know about my past, about what I did, and is he trying to punish me for it for some reason, or is that all in my head too? Although, if I didn’t imagine it, could he have somehow got in here? Tiny hidden cameras are probably part of a private detective’s arsenal, after all, aren’t they? And yet there’s been no sign of a break in, nothing at all to indicate that someone’s been in my house uninvited. But is it possible? Because someone’s been in here; that’s abundantly clear. And if it wasn’t a stranger, then that means it’s someone I know, and that doesn’t bear thinking about.

With a shudder, my face flushing, and sweat running down my spine, I go back to the porn site page and make myself watch the video footage again, properly this time, trying to pinpoint when each segment was filmed. The first appeared to be the Saturday after that Friday night when Barbara and Brenda came round for dinner, the night Mum bought me the new top that was far too small. I remember being upset that following evening, remember standing in front of the mirror naked after going up to bed, remember scrutinising my body. All the other footage is more recent: me in the bath on several different occasions, me pulling off my clothes in the bedroom, clearly drunk, and collapsing on the bed, legs splayed, showing the camera everything. There’s more, but I can’t watch it.

My stomach contracts and hot waves of shame and humiliation wash over me. I have to get this footage removed, somehow, but now all I can think about is who, who … Faces start to race through my brain, faces and dates and horrible possibilities. I think about the day Mum first came back, the day I spent the morning up on Cleeve Hill with Ruth and Deborah, and about how they knocked on the door on their way home wanting to use the loo. I think about Deborah rushing upstairs to use the bathroom, and taking ages, much longer than normal. Deborah, who’s been acting so oddly in recent days, with no real explanation. And then I remember the night before that, when Brenda and Barbara came round, when we were still friends, when we got drunk on cava, when I wouldn’t have noticed at all if one of them had nipped upstairs for a few minutes, when it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to be concerned. And then I think about the night a few days later when Mum took us out for pizza, and Barbara asked if she could slip into the house to look for her glasses, and how I happily