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

old friends around and so on. But here she was able to get away with it.’

We talked about Liv then, and how she fits in to all this. She’s Lucy’s sister, if what Eleanor at the art gallery said was true, and my grief intensified, because of course now I don’t have my longed-for sibling either. I am an only child again. We talked for two hours, me and my ex, longer than we’ve talked for a very long time, trying to work it all out and failing. When Jacob finally left, agreeing to keep the news to himself for now but telling me I needed to tell the doctors and the police, I nodded, promising I would. But since then I’ve just sat here, still numb with the shock of it all, paralysed with sadness.

My mother is still out there, somewhere. And she’s never coming back, is she? My life is in ruins; it was in ruins yesterday too, but at least then I thought I had my mother by my side, helping me through it all. Today, everything’s changed. This woman is not my ally, not my support. She’s the architect of my demise, and I was so stupid, so gullible, so desperate for her to be who she said she was that I just opened the door to my life and let her in. I let her do it. I made it easy for her to do it. And yet, how angry am I allowed to be about this? Jacob’s told me I must report her, that what she’s done must be a crime of some sort – fraud, harassment, identity theft, something – but the problem is, she had every right to do what she’s done. Finally, she’s made me pay. Can I really blame her for that? And now that she’s done it, and I know she’s done it, what next? What happens now?

What actually happens now, right now, is that a sudden, tiny movement across the room catches my eye. Her arm, thin and bare, has, while I’ve been sitting here lost in thought somehow snaked out from under the covers; her hand is twitching on the thin white sheet, jerking as if someone is pricking her with a needle. I gasp.

And then she opens her eyes.

Chapter 38

‘Hello, Alison. Mrs Allen,’ I say.

I’m standing over her, watching, waiting. A strange calm has come over me now, and I feel oddly composed. My tears have dried and my legs are feeling strong and solid beneath me.

It’s over, isn’t it? She’s done what she came to do and somehow I’ve survived it. She can’t hurt me anymore.

She blinks once, twice. Her eyelids are crusty and her face is as pale as the bandage that’s tightly wrapped around her head, and to my surprise I feel a wave of sympathy. This woman lost her little girl when she was just a few years older than Eloise is now, and when I try to imagine what that must have felt like, the agony she must have gone through, I just want to wrap my arms around her and sob. She must have hated me so much, for so long. What a way to live, with so much anguish and anger burning away inside you.

She’s moving her hand slowly to her face, pushing the oxygen mask aside, and now I vaguely remember a doctor popping in hours ago saying they’d reduced her sedation, and asking me to push the call button if she showed any signs of waking. I will, but not just yet, I think. We need to talk first.

‘Ahh. You’ve worked it out, then,’ she rasps.

She swallows and clears her throat feebly, and I nod.

‘I have,’ I say. ‘So. Want to talk about it?’

She blinks again.

‘What happened to me?’ she asks. Her voice is stronger now, her gaze more direct.

‘I don’t know. I came back to find all our guests standing in the driveway and you out cold on the floor inside. Don’t you remember anything?’

There’s a tiny shake of her head, and a wince.

‘Only vaguely. Last thing I really remember is you going out to get the wine. I assume from the way my head feels that somebody hit me?’

‘Hit you with my pelican lamp, apparently. Hope it’s not broken. I love that lamp.’

Good Lord, I’m so calm I’m even making little jokes now.

But there’s a flicker of a smile on her face too. We look at each other for a moment and then I turn away and walk across the room to pick up one of the plastic chairs. I put it down by the bed and take a seat.

‘Right,’ I say. ‘I’m sitting comfortably. Shall we begin? Because I think you have rather a lot to tell me, don’t you?’

She hesitates, but only for a moment.

‘I suppose I do,’ she says.

And so she begins. She’s clearly in pain and her voice wavers from time to time, her face contorting with pain, but at the same time I feel she’s revelling in her story. I find myself gripped, fascinated by the skill with which she wove the intricate web in which she trapped me, and then toyed with me, like a spider with a fly.

She didn’t know my mother; I’d been right about that. But they did, it seems, have one mutual acquaintance in Bristol, and that acquaintance – a woman called Saffy – had become an unwitting source of vital information for Alison.

‘I had this idea for years, to track you down. And then I remembered about your mother, and I wondered. I didn’t know Saffy well, but I knew she’d known your mum. As time went by, I thought about her and wondered if she could give me a way in. And then, as if by fate, I went to a party back in Bristol a year or so ago, and there she was. I just brought it up in conversation, casually. “Did that friend of yours who went missing back