I surprise Florence by beating her to the restaurant.
‘You’re never early,’ she tells me, removing her sunglasses.
‘Well done, Caitie, you’re on time, Caitie, I’m so proud of you, Caitie,’ I say in mock imitation.
She smiles.
I won’t admit I’m early because, for the first time in our friendship, I was nervous to see her. It’s been so long since we spent time alone together. I’ve told myself it’s because she’s planning a wedding, but that isn’t why. Pre-Olivia, we talked almost daily. Post-Olivia, I’m lucky to speak to her once a fortnight. If Florence’s attention is a banquet, Olivia has arrived at the feast and devoured it all, leaving me only with crusts and gristly pieces of meat. For weeks, I have been starving, wondering when I’ll get my next meal. Now, I plan to savour every bite.
I settle into a morning spent with one of my favourite people. The restaurant is packed. Waitstaff weave expertly between tables, carrying plates of poached eggs and smashed avocado on toast. There’s a lively, optimistic energy about the patrons that is unique to Saturdays, when the slog of a grey Monday morning feels farthest away.
Our drinks arrive. Florence raises hers and we clink glasses. ‘Brunch without a mimosa is just a sad, late breakfast,’ she announces.
I shake my head. ‘The only sad thing about this brunch is your gluten-free sourdough.’
‘It’s for the wedding – I’m trying to avoid a skin flare-up.’
‘It’s for people who want their food to taste like disappointment.’
She grins and I realise just how much I’ve missed her. ‘How’re the wedding arrangements going? Do you need any help?’ My offer is sincere. I’m lonely with nothing much to do. At least, nothing I want to do. This week, I should be in handover meetings with the current Year 4 teacher, but even the thought of talking through grade projections and SEN plans and learning objectives bores me to tears. And when I’m not avoiding work, I’m obsessing over Olivia and the masked man. Occasionally, my thoughts stray guiltily to Gideon. Those jade-green eyes, and broad shoulders, his delicious Irish burr. A day spent printing wedding menus would be a welcome distraction.
‘Actually, we’re pretty much done with the wedding.’
‘Really? What about all the little things like cutting ribbon for the chairs or prepping the favours?’
‘All done.’
‘I’m impressed. I can just about organise a trip to the bathroom each morning to brush my teeth.’
‘I’ve had help.’
‘You have?’
She nods. ‘Olivia.’
A vivid, uncomfortable silence descends upon us. I wade through hurt and confusion and slow burning indignation. I try to tamp down thoughts of I’m her maid of honour. I’m her best friend. I’m supposed to be the one sitting on her living room floor divvying confetti into rolled up newspaper cones. ‘If you’d told me you needed help, I’d have been there. I’ve offered a hundred times.’
She winces. ‘I know, I know, I didn’t plan for her to come over and do it all with me but the college talk ended early so—’
‘College talk?’
‘Yeah … Olivia’s joining Bath College in September, didn’t she tell you?’
My mouth falls open. ‘To study what?’
‘Art.’
‘Art?’ It bursts from me, an accusation. ‘Are you fucking kidding?’
Florence pulls a face. A very involuntary face. Her lips press together and she gives the slightest hint of a head shake. ‘She’s a grown adult, if she wants to take a foundation art course, she can.’ She regards me then. ‘I know you wanted to go to university to study art, Caitie, but you didn’t.’
I grit my teeth. ‘Yes, because after my sister was abducted I didn’t want to add to my parents’ upset,’ I say tightly. I am trying very hard to contain my frustration, reminding myself Florence doesn’t know that Olivia isn’t Olivia. That she is, in fact, a manipulative imposter.
‘Well, they aren’t upset about Olivia studying it. They’re happy for her,’ she says pointedly.
I sip my drink.
‘Maybe she’s taking the course so the two of you can bond,’ she offers.
This isn’t about bonding, Olivia is toying with me, trying to wind me up until I lash out, but why? She’s got my parents and my best friend wrapped around her little finger and, by the looks of how comfortable she was alone in a bedroom with my fiancé, she has Oscar in her snare, too. And now she wants to study art. I can’t believe I told her my dream of being an artist, of painting the world and travelling around it. Telling her was a big deal, or maybe we both just acted like it was. I relished reprising my role of little sister and she relished stepping into her new one – The Returned Arden Girl. But that’s all it was, theatre. And not even good theatre, at that. I need to tell Florence. But I’ve barely opened my mouth when she beats me to it. ‘Look, I have something to say.’
‘OK.’
‘Olivia is going to play at the wedding.’
I frown. ‘Play what?’
‘Piano.’
That doesn’t make any sense. ‘Olivia can’t play piano.’
‘She can. I heard her. She hopped on a community piano in Bath and she was brilliant. She’s performing Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ during the drinks reception after the ceremony. It’s her wedding gift to us.’
This is wrong. So wrong. My sister can’t play piano. Our grandmother used to have one but the most we learnt was ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. Before I can push my point though, Florence says, ‘And I decided to ask Olivia to be joint maid of honour.’
I almost drop my drink. ‘What?’
Our food arrives. The waitress, sensing the tension, sets our plates down and leaves quickly.
‘It just felt right,’ she says. ‘It’s a difficult situation because Olivia and I always used to talk about our wedding days. We agreed to be each other’s maid of honour years ago.’
The truth is, if Olivia had never disappeared, Florence and I probably wouldn’t be friends. It would have been Olivia holding Florence’s hair back at her graduation party as she puked green-glitter vodka shots. It would have been Olivia who lugged a million boxes up the stairs to her first apartment. It would have been Olivia who sat with her on the floor of her bathroom, squeezing her hand, waiting to find out if that broken condom had condemned her to a life of snotty noses and Peppa Pig, then celebrated with a very expensive bottle of champagne when it was one line instead of two. It would have been Olivia who painstakingly organised a hen weekend away in the Cotswolds, which felt less like corralling women she only vaguely knew and more like herding cats.
The knowledge that it should have been her and never me, smarts.
‘I mean, this is OK, isn’t it?’ she questions. But we both know that if she really cared about my opinion, she’d have asked before she went to Olivia.
‘Sure,’ I say because this is her wedding and everyone knows what the bride wants, the bride unquestioningly gets. She keeps talking and I keep smiling. What I feel though is a thud of despair. The shame of not being enough. Of being sidelined once more as the understudy, because the star of the show has returned. She’s telling me how fun it will be having two maids of honour. How it will be less stressful for me. How I’ll appreciate the help on the day. She’s dressing this up as a neatly wrapped gift for me. But it’s one I never asked for and don’t want. Still, it would be churlish to reject it, so I make my smile even wider until it feels clownish on my face.
‘I’m really pleased you don’t mind,’ she says. ‘I’ve been stressing about telling you.’
‘No need to stress,’ I say. We smile at each other. It’s strained and awkward because we both know I’m not OK with it and that she wouldn’t be, either.
Olivia, or rather, the woman impersonating her, is a brood parasite, a cuckoo intent on pushing me out of the nest so she can get fat and happy on my life. I stab at the bacon on my plate, at the still sizzling fat, and decide I’m not hungry. We lapse into uncomfortable silence. I listen to the women on the table beside us plan a minibreak to Slovenia. My fingers itch to book a plane ticket to literally anywhere. To run from Olivia and the masked man and Florence, too. All of them.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘You look … Are you sleeping?’
I think about the layers of brightening concealer I used to hide the dark circles under my eyes. Apparently, I needn’t have bothered. ‘I’m sleeping,’ I lie. ‘But it’s been trickier since the break-in.’ This, at least, is true. Sometimes, just as I’m about to drift off, I feel his gloved hand close around my throat, can taste the leather, and I jolt awake.
She nods. ‘Olivia mentioned it.’
I feel a pang of annoyance imagining the tales Olivia has spun. ‘And what did she tell you?’
She looks uncomfortable as she carefully chooses her words, trying to sand down the serrated edges of whatever Olivia has told her before she repeats it. ‘That you thought there was someone in the house but the police couldn’t find anything.’
‘I didn’t think there was someone in the house. I know there was. I was attacked.’
Her eyes widen, in disbelief or shock, I’m not sure. ‘Attacked?’
‘He pinned me against a wall and locked me in Oscar’s office, didn’t Olivia mention that bit?’
She doesn’t meet my eye as she slices into poached eggs and kale. ‘But he didn’t hurt you? Didn’t take anything?’
Her scepticism needles. ‘No, he didn’t.’ I still can’t explain why or what he wants, but I need her to know I’m telling the truth. ‘He’s been following me.’
She sets her knife and fork down. ‘Following you?’
‘Yes, I saw him a couple of days ago when I was in the park with—’ I cut myself off, not wanting to tell her about Gideon because I know she won’t understand.
‘With?’
‘My …’ I hesitate, not sure what to call him, ‘therapist.’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Why were you in a park with your therapist?’
‘We bumped into one another and it’s really beside the point.’
‘Did your therapist see this masked stalker?’
‘No.’
Silence.
She picks up her cutlery. ‘OK.’
Under the table, I dig my nails into my palms. She doesn’t believe a word I’m saying. I am a child trying to convince an adult she’s seen Father Christmas. Maybe if she knew Olivia isn’t really Olivia, she’d understand. I think carefully about how to broach the subject, like easing yourself slowly into a scalding bath. ‘Do you think Olivia is … like she used to be … before?’
She blinks, surprised by the swift change in topic. ‘Remarkably so. I was prepared for this rabid, broken wildling the day you picked me up to meet her, but she’s …’ she shrugs, ‘Olivia.’
‘Olivia … in what way?’
She thinks a moment. ‘Fun, but not frivolous. Kind, but not a wallflower. Confident, but not cocky. She was just the same at primary school.’ She sips her drink thoughtfully. ‘I met her on my very first day, did you know that? I joined halfway through Year 4 and I didn’t have a uniform. Half an hour in, this mean-faced girl comes up to me and tells me my buttercup-yellow dungarees are babyish.’
I wince, knowing at that age, this was a verbal bitch-slap of the highest order.
‘Then Olivia with her perfect, swishy ponytail, strides up to me and announces to the room that my dungarees are cool.’ She grins at the memory. ‘The next day was mufti day and almost everyone was wearing them, even the mean-faced girl.’ She tucks an inky strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I never felt alone at school, with her hand in mine, skipping around the playground. Then later, hanging out in our form room, sharing one pair of headphones, listening to Placebo on repeat. It’s rare to meet someone who holds so much power over others but chooses to use it to lift people up, instead of taking them down.’
She remembers Olivia just as I did. As a kind of nicotine electricity. Someone other people craved to be around. But I am certain that the girl who was snatched from Blossom Hill House and the woman who returned to it sixteen years later, are not the same. ‘Did you and Olivia talk about that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve spent a lot of time together since she came back, do you reminisce? Does she remember the same things you do?’
‘I don’t know. She … We talk about lots of things. Mostly, we’ve talked about Daniel and the wedding. Why?’
I bite my lip, unsure. But then, Gideon believed me, didn’t he? And he doesn’t even know me, not really. If he has faith in my theory, in me, Florence should, too. ‘She couldn’t remember Hathaway Cottage or our cousin Edward.’
Her gaze narrows. ‘Right …’
‘She knew about this old shed on the land behind our house even though it was built after she was taken.’
‘Caitie …’
‘She has a secret second phone and I caught her talking to someone about me. She—’
‘Stop,’ she implores, holding up a hand as though halting traffic. ‘Just don’t.’ She sets her cutlery down again, angry this time. ‘Look, do not say what you’re going to say.’
‘Florence—’
‘Listen to me, Caitie. She is Olivia. Everyone knows she is. The police – everyone. You’re going to make yourself seem completely mad and paranoid if you claim otherwise. If your parents find out you’re smearing their daughter, you’re going to alienate yourself from them entirely.’ She fixes me with a look that is both stern and disapproving. ‘They’re so happy to have her back and you should be, too.’
‘It isn’t her.’
She closes her eyes, as though wishing me away. ‘Why would someone pretend to be Olivia?’
‘Fame, money, attention.’
‘What fame, Caitie? She’s refused every single interview, and all the money that comes with them.’
‘I think she stole my father’s credit card the day we went shopping,’ I say, remembering how Mum had questioned me as Florence and Olivia reunited in the garden. I’d been distracted and hadn’t paid Mum much attention at the time.
‘You think she’s impersonating your sister for a few dresses and bags?’ She shakes her head.
‘I know it sounds wild, but—’
‘It does.’ She sighs as though I am a wayward child.
‘A DNA test would prove me right.’
She stares at me as though I’ve just announced I can’t count to ten. ‘They did a DNA test …’
My world starts to tilt off its access. I grip the table. ‘What?’
‘They did a test,’ she repeats.
‘How do you know?’
‘Clara told my mum.’
‘No,’ I whisper. ‘They couldn’t—’
‘The results were inconclusive due to some fault with the sample and when the police asked for another test a week later, Olivia said she’d been poked and prodded enough, and your parents backed her.’
‘So, she did something to the test on purpose.’ I lick my dry lips. ‘She still might not be my sister.’
‘Of course she’s your sister. Can you hear yourself, Caitie?’ Our gazes lock. She’s staring at me as though I’ve grown a second head. ‘Your parents backed her because they know their own daughter.’ She snatches up her already empty glass and drains it without noticing there’s nothing left. ‘You’re tired. You’re just over-tired and you’re struggling to manage this enormous change. Oscar and Olivia said the same.’
My face burns with indignation. ‘You’re all talking about me?’
‘Yes, because we all care.’
I laugh, harsh and dry. ‘But none of you care enough to listen to what I have to say.’
‘We are listening, Caitie, and that’s why we’re worried. A fake sister? Stalking? A masked assailant no one else has seen?’
My phone starts vibrating across the table. We both ignore it.
‘Why does that sound so insane? My sister was literally abducted by a masked assailant.’
She pulls a face.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Olivia doesn’t remember a mask. She said the police asked about the mask during her first interview and she told them she never saw one.’
I stare at her, mouth agog. The woman falsely claiming to be my sister has been undermining me from the very beginning. ‘He was masked,’ I insist.
‘Not according to her.’
‘Well her version of events doesn’t count because she isn’t who she claims to be!’ I spit with more volume and venom than intended.
The women at the table beside us fall quiet.
‘Caitie,’ Florence says in a placating tone. ‘Are you sure you want to be my maid of honour? It’s a lot of responsibility and I need the day to be as stress-free as possible. I don’t want to load any more onto your plate.’
I stare at her, wounded, sorrowful tears of rejection stinging my eyes.
This time, it is Florence’s phone that rings. She looks relieved as she answers it, glad for the brief reprieve. ‘Erm … yes, I’m with her now.’ She glances at me. ‘I’ll pass you over.’
She hands me her phone.
‘They’ve found him.’ It’s Mum, her voice is shaky, thick with emotion.
‘Who?’
‘Briggs.’
Florence leans forward, listening, a crease between her brows.
‘Who is Briggs—’
‘Simon Briggs. The man who took Olivia.’
Florence claps a hand over her mouth.
‘The police found him,’ says Mum.
I loosen with relief. We’re safe. We’re all going to be safe. And now they have him, the truth will come out. He’ll admit Olivia isn’t my sister. He’d confess to stalking me and the police will make him tell them why.
‘He’s at the police station right now?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘The morgue.’
I go from hot to cold and back again.
‘He’s dead, Caitie. Has been dead for weeks. It’s finally over.’