The Lies We Told by Camilla Way (best book recommendations txt) 📕

you what happened to Nadia. Rose told me the truth, Hannah. She told me how your mother died that night.” The only sound now was her own frightened, panting breath. “Hannah,” she said again, “open the door.”

Nothing, just a thick, impossible silence. “Your mother talked about you before she died,” Clara told her. “She said something to Rose that I think you’ll want to hear. Let me in, Hannah. I’m here alone. I just want to see Luke.” And then it came: the sound of a lock being turned. Clara briefly closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, there Hannah stood. They stared at each other for barely a moment before Tom pushed past Clara with such violence it sent her stumbling, and he shoved Hannah hard back into the flat as she let out a cry of surprise and rage.

“You fucking cunts,” Hannah spat before Tom gripped her by the throat and slammed her head against the wall.

“Where’s my brother?” he shouted. “Where’s Luke?” He propelled her now into the flat, the others on his heels. Clara felt around for a light switch, and the five of them flinched at the sudden harsh, cold brightness, blinking dazedly as they looked around themselves. The flat was small and dismal, in a similar state to the entrance hall with an added stench of decades’ worth of stale cigarette smoke. Off the narrow hallway was a living room, a tiny kitchen, and three more rooms, each with its door closed. “Luke?” Tom shouted. “Luke, are you here?”

A loud thump came from the farthest room and Clara darted toward it. “In here!” she cried, but when she tried the handle, she found that it was locked. The thumping continued. She turned to Hannah. “Open it! Where are the keys?”

When Hannah didn’t move, Oliver went to the door and tried the handle, putting his weight against it, but when it wouldn’t budge, he turned back to Hannah. “Give us the key,” he said.

Her face stretched into a sneer. “Fuck you.”

“Enough, Hannah!” Oliver shouted. “Enough! It’s over. Open the door.”

“No, it’s not over,” she said. “It will never be over.”

With a cry of frustration Clara went to one of the other doors and, finding it unlocked, switched on the light to find a bedroom with a mattress on the floor, a small wooden cabinet by its side, on top of which was a key. She snatched it up and went back to the locked door. Inserting the key with shaking hands, she turned it and pushed the door open. The room was in darkness, but when she found the switch, she cried out in horror. There was Luke, lying on the bed, gagged and bound with thick electrical tape, his eyes bulging at her as he let out a desperate, muffled cry.

Clara stood frozen as Rose ran past her. Throwing her arms around her son, she cried, “Oh, my darling, my darling boy,” and then Oliver was there too, kneeling down and cutting Luke free with one of Mac’s knives before he, too, took his son in his arms.

Luke coughed and spluttered when his gag was removed, crying out with desperate relief. He looked dreadful: thin and bruised, with blood all over his T-shirt, his eyes hollow in his pale, drawn face, his arms covered in knife wounds, some of them large and weeping. When finally Luke looked past his parents to where Clara stood, he said her name with such relief and longing that she jolted out of her paralysis and went to him, holding his thin body to her tightly, all the tension and confusion and fear of the past weeks surging out of her in one loud sob.

Finally she felt him stiffen in her arms, and she turned to follow his gaze to where Hannah now stood just inside the door, her arms still held tightly behind her back by Tom, her eyes bright with excitement. Luke rose unsteadily to his feet and went to her, crossing the room in a burst of energy and fury. “You fucking crazy bitch,” he shouted, his face red with rage, “you fucking evil cunt!”

Hannah laughed. “Temper, temper, Luke.”

“I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, stop whining,” Hannah said. “I fed you, didn’t I? Sometimes?” She raised her eyebrows. “Even took you to the potty when you needed it.”

Clara saw Luke’s face burn with humiliation. And then she did something she’d never done before. She went over to where Hannah was standing and she hit her full in the face, so hard that the sound rang out into the room, her palm smarting with the force.

Hannah gasped, her eyes flashing briefly with anger before she recovered and, setting her face in a sneer, said, “Well, look who’s found a pair of balls at last.”

Clara looked at her in disgust. “What now?” she asked. “You’ll go to prison for this! What was the point?”

“What was the point?” Hannah asked. “This.” She gestured toward Rose and Oliver, broken and desperate before her. “This was the point.”

“You said you’d leave us alone,” Oliver said. “We paid you thousands to stay away from Tom, to stay away from all of us. You said that would be the end of it!”

“Yeah, well. That was until I saw Luke again.”

“Saw him where?” asked Tom.

She shrugged belligerently. “I’d just come out of rehab, some bullshit thing the courts sent me on last time I got arrested, and I was begging outside Leicester Square station. There he was, larger-than-life, like a gift. I recognized him instantly.” Her face lit up as though she was revisiting a favorite memory. “So I followed him to work, and later I followed him home, and it all came back to me.” She glanced at Oliver. “What you did, how you gave me away. There I was, scrabbling about for money, fucking strangers to get by, no place to live, and I thought, I wonder how my dear old dad’s doing.”

She paused, fixing Oliver