Steph pressed again with the blade, hard as she dared without splitting the skin over Becca’s collarbone. This was the person who’d shown her how to do a French plait, told her what it was like to kiss a boy, comforted her when she’d been sad. The person whom Steph had looked after during seizures, who had always protected her in return. Now Steph was holding a knife to her throat.
“Keep going,” she said.
She had to hear it all, no matter how much it hurt. The guilt felt physical, piling on top of her. And a new horror was seeping in, now that Becca had revealed she’d paid Chris Watson to help her. Becca’s only source of cash was Steph. Had her own money funded this? Her mind raced over all those times Becca had asked her for a little extra to buy chocolate or beers, things to brighten her isolated days and nights.
Becca could hardly speak through her tears. “A couple of times we were able to fix it so Freya saw you on your way to visit me. We hoped if she kept spotting you in places you shouldn’t be, she’d think you were having an affair or something. And, as it turned out, she’d already got suspicions . . .”
The guilt hammered down harder. How could Steph have thought that her secrets would have no impact on her family? That she could live a double life without them ever sensing something amiss?
“That was all it was supposed to be,” Becca said. “That was all I wanted to do, but . . .” A sob jerked her body and caused the knife to break her skin, a tiny cut that sent a trickle of blood down her still-blotchy neck. Steph watched it run over the soft creases. They’d both aged, yet time had healed nothing, it seemed.
“It wasn’t enough,” Becca said. “I needed you to suffer.”
“So you made her suffer?” Steph cupped her hand beneath Becca’s chin and thrust her head back against the wall.
She could see the tension in Becca’s stretched throat, the hyper-awareness of the blade. Her cousin’s voice came out strangled: “Chris was only supposed to take her away for a couple of days. Just long enough to put you through hell.”
Steph banged Becca’s head against the plasterwork. “He kidnapped her?”
“He was meant to bring her back, no harm done. It was not planned this way. You have to believe—”
“Why should I? How could you do this? Freya’s innocent. She was your family—” Her unintentional switch to the past tense made something snap inside. And Becca’s “no harm done” was loaded with the message that the opposite was true. The message that a jacket soaked in blood might represent exactly what it seemed to. A foregone conclusion that strangers watching the news had probably already reached, because assuming the worst wouldn’t bring down their whole world.
Steph’s left hand pushed into Becca’s face, clawing soft eyelids, the squashy cartilage of a nose. There was white noise in her head and she was dimly aware of her cousin moaning; Steph was hurting her but she didn’t know how badly or whether she’d be able to stop.
Becca began to fight back. Steph felt her cousin’s hand against her chest, trying to shove her away. Her own hands were around Becca’s neck now, the knife jutting at an angle from her right.
“Please, Steph,” Becca gasped. “You don’t . . . she . . .” Her left arm flailed, swiping for the knife. Steph jerked the blade away, then grabbed Becca’s hair and pulled: a childish act of violence as if they were teenagers again. Becca cried out, and Steph felt herself splitting in two: one part wanting her cousin to feel all the pain that was gripping her own heart, another horrified at the prospect of harming her. Steph had killed for her mum all those years ago, and now perhaps she would kill for her daughter, destroying what was left of her own life in the process.
She shifted her palm back over Becca’s nose and mouth. Becca thrashed again with her left hand, shouting something incoherent, and Steph imagined she was driving her into the wall, through the bricks, making her disappear.
Then Becca became still.
Steph’s eyes snapped open. She hadn’t even realized she’d screwed them shut. Becca’s head lolled against the wall, her face slack and gray. Steph eased her grip and the knife clattered to the floor. Her mind wouldn’t clear enough to be sure of what she’d done.
Becca twitched beneath her hands. And as Steph looked again at her face, she realized she hadn’t smothered or strangled Becca. Her cousin was having a seizure. As far as Steph knew, it was her first in over twenty years. She’d shunned her medication while in prison, but had remained seizure-free. Apparently that could happen: Epilepsy could absent itself without any obvious explanation. Becca had told Steph, during one of her more candid moments last year, that it was almost as if she’d dreamed her condition: It’s like I dreamed it all. Mum, Dad, hairdressing, epilepsy . . . life.
Becca wasn’t convulsing like she’d done during seizures in the past. Her eyes were rolling, though, that left arm still raised as if stuck. Steph lowered her to the floor. The seizure gathered momentum and Steph was back in her old kitchen, or perhaps in Auntie Rach’s garden, anxious to help her cousin. Old habits took over: She slipped her hand beneath Becca’s head and, for a confused time-slip of a moment, she flooded with tenderness.
It was as if things were on pause for the length of Becca’s seizure, and then reality would be back, choices would have to be made, truths confronted. In her mind’s eye, Steph saw the wingspan of a plane with a rippling backdrop of stars. She felt a breeze on her face, a swooping sensation inside.
The room suffused with bleached light. It skated across the carpet, turned the walls into bright blank screens. Everything was awash with it: the secondhand furniture that Steph had bought for Becca; the sofa where they’d had so many strained conversations, but also where they’d laughed and reminisced, even in recent times.
She became aware of her name being shouted. Then somebody else was in the room, running toward her. The white light had gone, and Steph realized it must have been headlights from the street below.
Turning to her left, she saw Paul.
Paul is here. Kneeling beside her, staring at Becca stretched out on the floor with her eyes closed. Steph had never thought her husband and cousin would be in the same room. She’d spent the last four years doing everything she could to keep them apart.
“Steph, are you . . . ? What is this place? Who’s this woman?”
His questions flowed over her.
“You’ve got blood on you. Is it yours? Is it hers? Is Freya here?”
She swayed toward him and he shot out a hand to steady her. Her neck was covered in tears. “This is my cousin.” She pointed at Becca. “She and Chris Watson did this to Freya. Because of me. It was all because of me.”