And there was Rhiannon too. I couldn’t take the chance of her finding me here when she did come back from wherever she was. I had enough explaining to Sandra to do already, without adding nighttime walks to the agenda.

Because I had to fess up to her. That was the only possibility, I had realized that as I lay in Jack’s arms . . . maybe I had even known before. I had to fess up to everything, and risk losing the job. If she sacked me—well, I couldn’t blame her. And in spite of everything, in spite of the financial hole I would find myself in, with no job, and no money, and no references, in spite of all that, I would just have to suck it up, because I deserved it.

But if I explained, if I really explained why I had done what I’d done, then maybe, just maybe . . .

I had my jeans almost on when I heard the noise. It was not over the baby monitor but coming from somewhere outside the house, a noise halfway between a crack and a thud, as if a branch had fallen from a tree. I stopped, holding my breath, listening, but there were no more sounds, and no squawking wail from the baby monitor to indicate that whatever it was had woken Petra and the others.

Still, I pulled out my phone and checked the app. The camera icon marked Petra’s room showed her flung on her back with her usual abandon; the picture was pixelated and ill-defined in the soft glow from the night-light, but the shape was clear. As I watched, she sighed and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

The camera in the girls’ room showed nothing at all, I’d forgotten to switch their night-light on when I tucked them in, and the resolution was too poor to show anything except grainy black, punctuated by the occasional gray speckle of interference. But if they’d woken up they would have switched on the bedside light, so the absence was good news.

Shaking my head, I buttoned up my jeans, pulled my T-shirt over my head, and then bent and very softly kissed Jack on the cheek. He said nothing, just rolled over and murmured something indistinct that might have been, “ ’Night, Lynn.”

For a moment my heart stilled, but then I shook myself. It could have been anything. ’Night, love. ’Night then. And even if it was ’Night, Lynn or Liz, or any other name, so what? I had a past. Maybe Jack did too. And God only knew, I had too many secrets of my own to hold someone else’s up to the light to condemn them.

I should have just left.

I should have picked up the baby monitor, walked to the door, and let myself out.

But before I returned to the house, I could not resist one final look back at Jack, lying there, his skin golden in the firelight, his eyes closed, his lips parted in a way that made me want to kiss him one last time.

And as I glanced back, I saw something else.

It was a purple flower, lying on the countertop. For a minute I couldn’t work out why it looked familiar, nor why my gaze had snagged on it. And then I realized—it was the same as the flower I had found the other morning in the kitchen and put into the coffee cup to revive. Had Jack left the flower on the kitchen floor? But no—he had been away that night, running errands for Bill . . . hadn’t he? Or was that a different night? Lack of sleep was making the days blur, run into each other, and it was becoming hard to remember which of the long, nightmarish stretches of darkness belonged to which morning.

As I stood there, frowning, trying to remember, I noticed something else. Something even more mundane. But something that made me stop in my tracks, my stomach lurching with unease. It was a little coil of string. Totally innocuous—so why had it unnerved me so?

I walked back across the room and picked it up.

It was a hank of white caterers’ string, doubled and tripled up, and tied with a granny knot that was suddenly horribly familiar. And it had been cleanly severed—snipped in half by a very sharp knife, or perhaps the very pair of pruning shears I had rescued from the poison garden.

Whichever it was, it didn’t really matter now.

What mattered was that it was the hank of string I had wound around the poison garden gate, too high for little hands to reach—the string I had put there to keep the girls safe. But what was it doing in Jack’s kitchen? And why was it lying next to that innocent-looking flower?

As I pulled out my phone and opened up Google, there was a sick fluttering feeling in my chest, as if I already knew what I was going to find. Purple flower poisonous I typed into the search bar, and then clicked on Google Images, and there it was, the second image, its strange drooping shape and bright purple color totally unmistakable. Aconitum napellus (monkshood), I read, the feeling of sickness growing inside me with every line. One of the most toxic flowers native to the UK. Aconitine is a potent heart and nerve toxin, and any part of the plant, including stems, leaves, petals, or roots, can be deadly. Most deaths result from ingesting A. napellus, but gardeners are advised to use extreme caution in handling cuttings, as even skin contact can cause symptoms.

Underneath it was a list of deaths and murders associated with the plant.

I shut down the phone, and turned to look at Jack, unable to believe it. Had it really been him, all along?

Him in the locked garden, pruning the poisonous plants, keeping that horrible place alive.

Him undoing the safety measures I had set up to try to protect the children.

Him, carefully selecting the most poisonous blossom he could find and leaving it lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. All I had done was handle it—but it could so easily have been found by the children, or even one of the dogs.

And I had just fucked him.

But why? Why would he do it? And what else was he responsible for?

Had he been the person who hacked into the system to jolt us all out of our beds in the middle of the night with deafening music and terrified screams?

Was he the one who had been setting off the doorbell, jerking me from sleep, and keeping me awake with the terrifying creak, creak of stealthy footsteps?

And worst of all, had he been the one who wrote those horrible things in the locked attic room, and then boarded up after himself, only to “rediscover” it when the time was right?

I found that my breath was coming quick and short, my hands shaking as I shoved the phone back into my pocket, and suddenly I had to get out, get away from him at all costs.

Not troubling now to be silent, I flung open the door to the flat, and stepped out into the night, slamming it behind me. It had started to rain again, and I ran, feeling the rain on my cheeks, the tightness in my throat, and the blurring of my eyes.

The utility room door was still unlocked, and I let myself in, leaning back against the door and using my T-shirt to wipe my eyes, trying to get a hold of myself.

Fuck. Fuck. What was it about me and the men in my life? Why were they such shits, all of them?

As I stood there, trying to calm my gulping breath, I remembered the faint sound I’d heard before, as I was dressing. The house was just as I’d left it: no sign of Rhiannon’s high heels kicked off in the hallway, or handbag abandoned on the bottom step of the stairs. But I hadn’t really expected that. I would have heard a car pulling up. It had probably been one of the dogs.

I wiped my eyes again, peeled off my shoes, and walked slowly through to the kitchen, feeling the faint warmth of the underfloor heating striking up through the concrete. Hero and Claude were curled sleepily in their baskets, snoring quietly. They looked up as I came in, and then laid their heads wearily back down as I sat at the breakfast bar, put my head in my hands, and tried to decide what to do.