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

remotely. When he’d got enough, he came back when it was just Alison in the house and took the cameras out again, which was obviously why there was nothing here when I got the house swept.’

‘Wow. Sneaky,’ says Jacob.

‘I know. It makes sense now that she didn’t push it when I wondered if I should go to the police about the pictures too. That’s the last thing she would have wanted. This bloke sent the footage to that horrible website and hacked my Facebook account to post the link. She told him to use the name Daphne Blake to try and freak me out, which of course it did. It was Lucy’s nickname at school, you see. She guessed I’d remember that, and she was right; that was when I finally realised what was behind everything that was going on. She was the one who tipped off the newspaper reporter too. She’d been hoping he’d tell the whole story about what happened with Lucy but obviously he couldn’t, for legal reasons. That was why she decided to out me at the party instead.’

I remember, then, how she’d cried that day the newspaper article came out. How she’d mentioned Lucy and sobbed. She was crying for her lost daughter, not for me, wasn’t she? I think. And then I think of the day I asked her, weeks ago, if she’d kept in touch with anyone at all, if she knew anything of what I’d got up to in my school days; I think of her tears that day too, and my heart quivers. When she first arrived, she’d said something like: ‘You never forget your child’s face, do you?’ Now I know what she really meant: ‘You never forget the face of the girl who killed your daughter, do you?’

We’d never actually met, not back then. But there would have been school photos. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to find out what I looked like.

‘Wow,’ says Crystal. ‘Beth, I do understand why you didn’t confide in us earlier about that, I really do.’

At my request, Jacob had filled her in about me and Lucy Allen last night, and she’d been kindness personified, hugging me almost as hard as the kids had when she arrived this morning.

‘But I really wish you had. We might have been able to help, to work out who was behind it all …’

‘I know. I was an idiot. Thanks, Crystal.’

For a few seconds, nobody speaks. Upstairs, Eloise has turned her music on, the thump thump of a Little Mix track drifting through the ceiling.

‘She was so convincing in getting me to blame Robin for everything too,’ I say. ‘Making up all that stuff about her acting suspiciously in my bedroom and bathroom. She admitted none of that happened. She made it up to cover the fact that she’d moved some of my stuff around herself, trying to work out the best place for her mate to put those cameras. I believed her, because I’d seen Robin looking at papers on my desk and stuff once or twice, so I already had a few doubts about her. I need to apologise to Robin, if she’ll let me. God, I even blamed her for messing with the central heating.’

‘Alison, again?’ asks Crystal.

‘Yep. She told me she kept whacking it up to the hottest possible setting, and then making sure she turned it back down to normal again before I checked it. Robin was constantly asking her too many questions, she said, and she wanted me to blame her, wanted me to get rid of her. Gosh, so many things. She destroyed that letter of Eloise’s, so I never saw it and so she missed her school trip. And then, of course, there was the trampoline incident.’

‘Shit. Was that her too? The evil bitch!’ says Jacob.

‘Shh … no swearing. Remember, the kids are just upstairs,’ Crystal hisses.

‘Sorry, but she could have bloody killed one of them,’ he says. ‘What did she do, tamper with it after you’d set it up?’

‘Yep. First she hid the spring puller tool so I thought I was going mad. And then she loosened a screw or something, knowing it would probably cause an accident. She didn’t even seem to care that Finley got hurt.’

‘Christ,’ says Jacob, and shakes his head slowly, his mouth set in a grim line.

I knew how he feels. A chill had gone through me when Alison had told me about that. There’d been a coldness in her eyes, and I knew exactly what she was thinking.

You took my daughter away from me. Why shouldn’t I have at least tried to take one of your children away from you?

‘She wrote an anonymous letter to Gabby at work too,’ I say, and I tell them about that. They look horrified again.

‘It was classic coercive control, when you think about it,’ says Crystal. ‘Slowly, very slowly, eroding all your self-confidence. Making you feel bad about your weight and your body. Making you think you were going crazy, humiliating you in front of your friends, making you feel like you were a bad mother. Getting rid of Robin, and even making things so bad here that Jacob took the kids, so you’d be even more isolated. What an actress though. BAFTA-worthy performance. Hey, you fell out with Brenda and Barbara as well, didn’t you? Do you think she could have had a role in that too?’

‘Oh. Flipping heck, maybe. I hadn’t even considered that,’ I say.

‘So nasty,’ says Jacob darkly. ‘You must hate her. She put you through hell.’

‘I don’t know how I feel about her,’ I say. ‘She was so clever, always making it seem like she was on my side when everyone else was against me. She even told me she felt bad talking about her past because she didn’t want it to seem like she’d had a great life without me. I know why she was sometimes so reticent now, don’t I? I’m just glad it’s over, and that I