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B y the time they returned to Sanctuary, the sky was as dark as their mood.

They’d driven back in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Emily’s were mostly a mental list of all the things she felt she knew.

Kate had been sent anonymous emails. The night she died, Jack had been lured out of his home by Ben, who then hadn’t shown up to their meeting. The same Ben that Ruth said Kate didn’t like, who had a history of abusing women and getting away with it. Now here they were, almost a year on, in a house owned by Ben, writing a book about that night, and Jack’s ghostwriter was getting anonymous emails not unlike the ones Kate had received, plus one note slipped under an internal door. Soon after, Ben, having already followed Emily, accosted her on the beach and demanded to know if she’d got his message.

As far as she was concerned, there was only one way to connect the dots.

It seemed overwhelmingly obvious that the common denominator in all this was Ben, that he must have had something to do with Kate’s death. That he was behind whatever was happening here, now, presumably in a bid to stop anyone from revealing that.

To make sure that it was Jack who took the fall.

But Jack was in denial.

Despite everything, he seemed to still feel there could be a logical explanation for all this that didn’t involve his best friend.

‘What happens now?’ she asked him as he turned the car onto Beach Read’s street. ‘What are we going to do?’

He didn’t answer until he’d pulled up outside the house, at the kerb. He kept the engine running.

‘I’m going to drop Grace back to the hotel,’ he said, ‘and then, while I’m there, I’ll go talk to Ben.’

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘But I thought you didn’t—’

‘I don’t. But you do, and this is a house he has access to, and I want you to feel safe. I’ll tell him I really need a drink and ask if it’s OK for me to crash there. That way you’ll know he won’t be anywhere near here tonight. I’ll make sure of it.’

It also meant she’d be completely alone in the house.

But out of two bad options …

‘In the morning,’ Jack went on, ‘I’ll tell him he can go, that I’m fine, that I’ll be leaving soon anyway, and see him off to Miami or wherever. Then I’ll come back here so you and I can continue as planned. We have to. Because if Joe gets wind of any of this – the emails and the note and that blonde woman and Ben supposedly following you—’

Emily resented that supposedly .

‘—then this will be over. Completely. There’ll be no book. Ever. Not the one I wanted to write, anyway. Same if Ruth finds out, because she’ll tell Joe. Or Grace, because she’ll tell Ruth. So, please, Emily. Can we just …? Can we just set all this aside for now? It’s just for one more day. I need to finish telling my story and that might be the last chance I have.’ He had said all this to her face but now he turned away, to stare straight ahead into the darkness. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen when I go back home.’ The lights on the dash gave his face a bluish glow and revealed that his eyes were glistening.

Jack looked exhausted, deflated – a man made of only broken pieces. Emily wanted to reach out to him, to put a hand on his and tell him that it was all going to be OK, that they were going to make sure Kate’s death was where the terrible things stopped happening to him.

But enough people in his life were already lying to him.

Including her.

It wasn’t Alice’s dad who’d come home that night so long ago, soaking wet, on the same night a girl was murdered and thrown in a local lake.

Alice was the best friend, the only person Emily had ever told about it.

She’d made a horrible mistake. Not that night, not back then. She’d somehow found enough grace not to blame a girl who’d been twelve years old for only a matter of hours for what she had or hadn’t done. She didn’t even know what she’d seen, really. It wasn’t like her father had come home covered in blood, or drunkenly confessed on one of the nights when he went too far down a bottle of Powers. But later, when she was older and he was still alive, she did put the pieces together – and did nothing with the picture that emerged. Later again, she did something to compound this failure to act: she wrote The Witness . Centred herself in someone else’s tragedy, someone else’s nightmare. And when its rightful owner came to claim her pain, to beg for answers, Emily had, once again, done nothing.

That letter had contaminated everything with shame, stopped her from writing another word and ever since hummed like a constant, anxious anticipation running beneath the floors of her life.

But didn’t she deserve it? Didn’t she deserve so much worse ?

Emily thought so.

And now, here she was, with another desperate person trapped in a waking nightmare, looking for answers and coming to her for help with the search.

But this time, she could get them.

And in time.

She could help Jack and maybe, in doing so, redeem a little of herself. Start to fill the yawning hollow at her core, to lower the temperature at which her shame burned.

To try to make things right.

‘You’re right,’ she said now. ‘It’s just one more day and it might be all the time we have, so … Yeah.’

She hadn’t told him that Morningstar had explicitly instructed her to use the remaining time to force the confession, but it had been a bad enough day as it was.

They could broach that subject in the morning.

Jack held up a plastic fob and Beach Read’s garage door began to retract. He asked her if she had his phone number. She didn’t. He called it out while she tapped it into her phone, then rang him so he’d have hers. His device was still in the car door; it glowed and buzzed angrily at the incoming call.

‘Keep your phone on,’ he said, ‘and call me if you need to. Any time, it doesn’t matter how late. OK?’

She nodded. ‘OK.’

‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

Emily climbed out of the car and went into the open garage, through the archway and out into the courtyard.

Grace was sitting by the pool with a tote bag slung over a shoulder and her phone in her hand, ready to leave.

‘Jack is outside, Grace. He’s going to drive you back to your hotel.’

‘Where were you two this time?’ she snapped as she stood up. But then she seemed to register Emily’s demeanour, and her expression softened. ‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. Everything’s fine. I’m just exhausted.’

Grace looked at her doubtfully.

‘Really,’ Emily said. ‘I’m fine. I’ll see you in the morning.’ She pointed behind her, towards the street where Jack was waiting with the engine running. ‘You should go.’

‘Your dinner arrived,’ Grace said. ‘I had to put it in your refrigerator. I didn’t know when you’d be back, so …’

‘That’s fine. Thank you.’

The last thing Emily wanted now was food. All she wanted to do was crawl into bed, close her eyes and forget about everything for the next eight hours. She waved Grace off and started up to the stairs, to Bookmark.

She was halfway up when she felt her phone buzz with a call from Mark.

‘Hey,’ he said when she picked up.

And that was all it took: one word. And that word was hey . But something about hearing Mark’s voice, after everything that had happened today, so far this week, since that night all those years ago …

Whatever had been holding her together – just about – crumbled in an instant, and Emily burst into tears.

‘Em?’ Mark said in her ear. ‘Em? Are you all right?’

‘I’m sorry.’ A sob broke in between the two words.

‘What’s going on? What’s wrong?’

Everything, and she missed him.

‘Nothing, I’m fine,’ she said, wiping at her eyes.

‘Sounds like it.’

Down below, the courtyard was empty. No audience for her emotional unravelling, thank God. She hurried to let herself into Bookmark, flipping on all the lights and closing the front door firmly behind her.

‘Em, can we switch to FaceTime? I want to see you.’

She saw her reflection in the glass and said, sniffling, ‘No. No, you really don’t.’

‘Then talk to me. What’s happened?’

‘Nothing. I’m OK. It’s just …’ She sat down on the couch. ‘This is a lot more stressful than I thought it was going to be. And I’m absolutely exhausted. Today felt like a month long.’

‘Why?’

‘Mark, I can’t really talk about it.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘No, I mean I physically can’t. Not right now. I don’t have the energy. I’ll tell you everything when I’m back, I promise.’

‘Are you OK, though? I mean, are you safe? Because that file I asked you to send me. Off the Olympus—’

‘I sent it.’

Last night, just before she’d gone to bed, she’d remembered to do what Mark had asked her to do in his last message: download the most recent recording from his voice-recorder and email it to him.

‘You sent something,’ Mark said, ‘but it wasn’t that. I think you accidentally sent me a recording of Jack.’

Emily frowned. ‘What?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But that’s not possible. I didn’t use that device at all, to record anything, and there’s nothing of him on my computer I could’ve accidentally sent instead.’

‘What’s going on over there, Em?’ Mark asked. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? You’d tell me if you weren’t, right?’

Why did he keep asking her that?

‘There’s some weird stuff on there,’ he said. ‘Nearly three hours of it. I only listened to the first couple of minutes – don’t freak out, I’ve already deleted it from my laptop and the email you attached it to – but that was enough.’

‘Enough for what?’ Emily rubbed at her eyes. ‘Maybe I, I don’t know, sat on my backpack and accidentally recorded some audio off the TV. Don’t worry about it.’

‘He uses your name.’

‘Who does?’

‘Jack.’

‘But it can’t be Jack. I didn’t use that recorder. They gave me one here and insisted I use it. That I only use it. I haven’t even taken yours out, it’s been in my bag the whole—’

But the rest of that sentence died in her throat, because it hadn’t been in her bag the whole time, had it?

It had, temporarily, disappeared. Had someone transferred one of Jack’s interview sessions onto it while it was gone? But how?

And why ?

‘Hang on,’ she said, before putting the phone down on the coffee table and tapping to switch the call to speaker. ‘I’ll go get it.’

Emily stood up and scanned the room, looking for her backpack. It was on the floor, under one of the stools.

And the Olympus was on the breakfast bar.

She stopped short at the sight of it. What was it doing there? She’d put it back into the backpack, hadn’t she? She remembered slipping it into the interior pocket, zipping the compartment closed. Or was she remembering what she’d done after it reappeared? Had she actually done that last night, after sending Mark the file?

‘ Emily? ’ Mark’s voice, tinny from the phone’s speaker.

‘Yeah,’ she said absently.

She reached to pick it up. It was an older model, chunky and cumbersome, its LCD screen giving her flashbacks to her first mobile phone, which had been a hand-me-down from her mother. She pressed buttons to navigate her way to the file menu, making at least three wrong turns, until finally she managed to bring up a list of all the recordings that were currently on the device. There were a dozen or so, named for dates.

They’d all been made weeks ago, except for one.

‘ Hello? ’ said disembodied Mark.

She turned back to pick up the phone and said, ‘I’m really sorry, I’ll have to call you back,’ just as Mark said, ‘ Emily, what the — ? ’

She ended the call.

She went back to the Olympus, leaned against the breakfast bar’s edge, and held it with two hands as she played the file recorded yesterday, the one that was two hours and fifty-six minutes long.

A rustling noise, a gentle thump , and then a woman’s voice, far away from the microphone, saying what sounded like, ‘ It’s on now .’

Then another voice, male and clear and much closer.

‘ Emily, hi. I know this is weird but please just listen. We don’t know how else to do this. I’ve tried to approach you, but I think I scared you. Or maybe he’s got to you. He does that. Don’t blame yourself. But whatever he said about me, it’s not true. Most of what he says in general isn’t true. But anyway. We’re trying this. We figure it’ll be easier to tell you to listen to the message than find an opportunity to tell you all this without him knowing. So, yeah. This feels strange, talking to you like this. But it’s time. I want to tell my story. You’ll be the first person in the world to hear it in full. Here goes. ’

She stared at the device in confusion.

‘ Most guys say they were born to be cyclists, that it was in their blood. I became one by chance. I was thirteen when I got my first serious bike, for my birthday. The first birthday without my dad in the house. ’

She jabbed at the fast-forward button, holding it down for a few seconds.

‘ —spend their entire careers chasing this one thing – a win at Wimbledon, an F1 world championship, an Olympic gold medal – and I wonder, what happens when it doesn ’ t happen? How can you point everything in your life towards one goal, only to never make it? How can a person recover from that level of disappointment? ’

She skipped forward some more.

‘ —they ’ re not your friends, they ’ re your brothers. And it can get confusing, because you ’ re also their domestique. I suppose it ’ s a bit like being a ghostwriter, isn ’ t it? I mean, I don ’ t know that much about it, you ’ d know better than me, but a domestique can ’ t have any ego and – I imagine? – for a ghostwriter, it ’ s the same. ’

And some more.

‘ —when the door opened and a woman I had never seen before came running out. I say woman, but she was probably sixteen or seventeen. Let ’ s say eighteen, at most, for the benefit of the doubt. I remember her dress was ripped at one shoulder and she was running with her hand up against her heart, holding it up. She had no shoes on. She didn ’ t look at me. To be honest, I ’ m not even sure she saw me. She just pushed past and took off down the corridor. ’

She skipped almost to the end of the recording, pressing P LAY when there was less than a minute left to go.

‘ —is here, by the way. Here in Florida. She’s staying nearby, hiding away so he doesn’t see her. But she wants to talk to you. She wants to tell you everything she knows. About her conversations with Kate, especially. And … And what happened that night. Because she was there. I don’t know how all this is going to work out, but we’ll find a way .’

But it wasn’t Jack’s voice telling her all this.

It was Ben’s.

Movement, across the room, caught her attention.

Emily looked up and watched in pure, paralysing horror as the connecting door – her connecting door, on this side – began to slowly open.