“What are you doing here?” Becca said, a blaze of fear in her eyes. Then she adjusted her tone, as if to sound casual: “You’re not due to visit until tomorrow.”
Steph was incredulous as they stared at one another across the living room of the maisonette. Was Becca really going to act like everything was normal? They hadn’t spoken since Freya had disappeared, so officially her cousin was oblivious, but surely they were past that now. Hadn’t Becca sent somebody with a note, only an hour ago, to summon Steph? To invite this confrontation and whatever it would lead to?
“You’re leaving.” Steph gestured at the packed bag lying on Becca’s sofa.
Becca opened her mouth, then pressed it closed again. Steph saw the familiar nervous blotches on her neck. Her cousin’s hair was long and unstyled now, her skin dull from so much time spent indoors, her clothes plain. Steph always felt conscious of her own tailored work suits and salon-smooth hair when she visited. In a way she had become Becca, had borrowed her sleek style and social confidence as she’d built her new life.
“Where is she?” Steph rushed forward, the words spitting out. “Where’s my daughter?”
Becca backed off toward the wall. “What?”
“I know you’re behind this. I didn’t want to believe it at first . . .” Steph’s eyes scanned the room again, searching for any signs that Freya had been there.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then why are you running away?”
“It’s best for both of us if I leave. You’ve got other things to think about than me.”
“You’re lying.”
Becca suddenly stood firm, lifting her chin. “Well, you’re the expert on that, Kate.”
Steph flinched at her former name. Becca threw it at her occasionally, when she was having a bad day. Clearly Steph had underestimated the depth of her resentment all these years. There had been signs, of course: the times when the visits had felt strained, or when Becca had seemed barely there, turning her back to gaze through a crack in the curtains. But there had also been lingering affection. A sense that they had gone through a journey and that, whatever had happened, they were still family, still inescapably tied. We did it together, Becca had once said, the only time they had really discussed their crime, and her conviction. Telling them you were involved wouldn’t have changed anything for me, even later. But maybe she’d been trying to convince herself. She hadn’t looked at Steph as she had said it, hadn’t wanted to talk about it for long.
“Tell me the truth.” Now Steph couldn’t gauge her own volume: She might have been shouting or whispering. The knife slithered down her arm and emerged from her sleeve. Becca recoiled in shock.
Steph backed her into the wall, lifting the knife to her throat. “What have you done?”
The air seemed to tremble around them. Becca mouthed something, as if afraid to speak aloud with the blade so close. Steph moved it even closer. “Tell me.”
“Oh, God,” Becca said softly.
“Tell me!”
“Please . . . it wasn’t supposed to go this far.”
Steph inhaled sharply. For a second her vision went black. She grazed Becca’s jawbone with the knife. “What wasn’t?”
Tears gleamed in her cousin’s eyes. “Freya’s everything to you—”
“Yes.”
“You always avoid telling me too much about your life, but you can’t resist gushing about Freya. That’s how I knew she was the way to get at you.”
Steph’s lungs seemed to crush up into her throat. Becca had gone after Freya. Because of her. The confirmation made her buckle. It took all her strength to stay standing.
“I only wanted to scare you.” Becca began to weep. “To make you feel like your perfect life was vulnerable, it could be snatched away, like mine was . . .” Her words gathered momentum, flowing fast and angry. “I’ve been your dirty secret, kept here in this house. Before that I was locked up for something you did, something I protected you from, out of loyalty, and love . . .”
“I—”
“I wanted to make you feel even a tiny bit of what I’ve been through. You haven’t got a clue what prison’s like! In all these years, you’ve never even asked. And I’m still a prisoner—I can’t get a job, have any freedom. You keep control of me, make sure I don’t interfere with your precious new existence . . .”
“You were the one who skipped parole. You could’ve rebuilt your life, stayed out of mine—”
“You don’t get it, do you? My life was over the second I was convicted. There was no way to go back.”
An image came into Steph’s head: Becca’s pale, stunned face turning toward her as she’d been led out of the courtroom following the verdict. Quick on its heels, the moment Steph had strolled out of her comfortable home twenty-one years later, texting thirteen-year-old Freya to make sure she’d got to school, and stopped dead because Becca had been standing in front of her. Aged and dull-eyed. The embodiment of everything Steph had tried to escape.
Becca had skipped parole, left the halfway house where she’d been living since her release, and made it her mission to reappear in her cousin’s life. She’d figured out Steph’s workplace from a comment Steph had let slip the one time she’d visited her in prison, and from that her new name, eventually her address. And Steph couldn’t turn her away, though she’d bundled her hastily into her car that first morning, out from under the neighborhood’s gaze. Of course she’d had to provide her with a home, money, a strange kind of companionship and protection. What she couldn’t offer was a real place in her new family. If she had, maybe things would have been different.
As the years had gone on, Steph had continued to fund Becca’s unofficial existence, sneaking off to visit her in the maisonette whenever she could. They’d fallen into a routine of small-talk and tea, as though Becca was an elderly relative Steph was dutifully checking on. But it had sat there between them. The injustice of Steph’s freedom and happiness versus Becca’s limited life.
“I wanted to turn Freya against you,” Becca said, “to show her you weren’t everything you claimed. That was all.”
Steph closed her eyes. Her other big mistake had been ever to utter her daughter’s name to Becca. Her pride in Freya, her inability to shut up about her . . .
“You told me about the argument with Freya’s driving instructor.”
Steph’s eyes flew open. “What?”
More scarlet blotches had broken out on Becca’s neck. “It made me so angry. That the biggest thing you had to worry about was whether your daughter’s driving instructor was milking you. When you wouldn’t even let me have a car until I begged like a child last year! Afraid of giving me too much independence . . .”
Steph started to protest but the words dissolved. Becca was right. The things that had once made her indignant seemed unbelievably petty now. And she had tried to restrict her cousin’s freedom—not out of overprotectiveness, like with Freya, but out of fear for herself, a need to contain what Becca represented.
“I sympathized with the instructor,” Becca said. “I imagined this poor guy on the receiving end of your demands and accusations . . . That was how much I’d come to resent you, cooped up here keeping your secrets. I’d reached my limit, I suppose. One day, I got so livid that I looked him up. And . . . and I called him.”
Steph stared at her. “You called Chris Watson?”
Becca wouldn’t return her eye contact. The defiance had evaporated. Tears spilled down her cheeks again. “It was a whim. A reckless decision.”
“What did you say to him?”
“That I’d heard he was having a disagreement over one of his students. And that I was an interested party . . . with a proposition for him.”
Steph could hardly breathe. There was a thick, sour taste in her mouth. “A proposition?”