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I see him, just there, on the hill that leads into the village.

He pulls behind him a small case on wheels.

His hair is brown. His face is clean-shaven.

He is wearing a hoodie and shorts, has a bottle of water in his hand.

He could be anyone, any tall, good-looking bloke arriving on his holidays at a quiet village ten miles inland from the coastal resorts of the Algarve.

My heart races at the sight of him. With his hair that color, he looks like he did when we first met.

I leave the door of my cottage open behind me and start down the quiet road toward him.

I know I should wait, but I can’t. I have missed him so much, this beautiful man—my husband.

And I know that I am his only true wife.

I am the only one with whom he shared his real name: Simon Smith.

He shared it with me four years ago as a reward for my loyalty.

“I have never given this name to anyone else,” he had said, kissing the backs of my hands, his blue eyes limpid with gratitude, with love.

I am the only one who has ever been truly loved by him and the only one who has ever loved him the way he deserves to be loved.

I am the only one who knows him, who gets him, who would sacrifice everything for him.

All the others, the ones I read about in the papers, Laura, Tara, Nina, Martha, they’re nothing. They’re nobodies.

The woman caught on camera leaving my flat the day that Tara disappeared was me.

I was wearing Tara’s clothes. We had the same build, the same overall look—I put the hood of her winter coat up and kept my face away from the CCTV cameras that followed me as I walked to the station, took the tube to Paddington and then the train to Reading.

In the toilet on the train, I changed out of my disguise and back into my normal clothes, dumped Tara’s clothes in a bin behind a shopping precinct, sat in a Caffè Nero for an hour, and then got a train back to London.

Simon used Tara’s phone to send messages to her daughter, and of course to his own phone.

He’d made sure he was caught on CCTV in the local area in the hours after I left my flat dressed as Tara.

Whatever anyone might have suspected, there was no way anyone could ever point the finger at us. We’d put ourselves beyond suspicion.

Simon stayed with me for a day or two and then he had to go. I thought he was coming here, to the Algarve. He told me he would call me when it was safe for me to join him. I had no idea, of course, that he was going to her place. That Martha woman. I only found that out later.

It was a weird time. I feel strange about it.

I did some uncomfortable things at Simon’s behest. All that business with the wine bar, leaving horrible reviews, pretending I’d been assaulted.

And then I don’t know what happened exactly, but the next thing I heard, it was all over the papers that Luke was dead.

He’d taken his own life. I felt bad about that, even if his family did say he’d been suffering with his mental health for most of his adult life.

I did wonder if it was something to do with the rat and the complaints. Something to do with me…

I drank a lot during those first few weeks to numb the trauma of what had happened with Tara at my flat.

And yes, I have not seen my boys for four years, and who knows when I’ll see them again.

They thought their dad was dead for over twenty years and then they watched him die again in front of their very eyes.

My poor babies. But they have their lives to live, and I have mine.

It was all going to be worth it in the end.

Simon would come and then we could be a family again.

Or at least that’s what I thought.

My husband’s beautiful face breaks open into a wide smile at the sight of me on the road.

I feel a blast of happiness and then I remember that I helped this man dismember a woman’s body, which I then, at his request, disposed of in three separate areas of woodland around the M25.

I made excuses for this man, I loved him, stole for him, lied for him, and hated him.

This man has made me miss four years of my children’s lives, the first year of my only grandchild’s.

For four years he has been promising me that he was coming, that he was planning it, sorting it, making it happen.

I’ll be there next month, he kept telling me.

Just a few things to tie up. I’m on my way.

I’ll be with you tomorrow. I’ve booked my flight.

And then always the excuses about sickness and treatment and money and passports.

He called me a week ago with a story about a trap he’d escaped.

He said he needed to lie low for a while, sort some things out.

I thought it was another excuse, that he was lying yet again.

But then he called last night. “I’ll be with you tomorrow evening.

Six o’clock. I can’t wait to see you again.

I’ve missed you so much. You have no idea. ”

My husband doesn’t see the man emerge from my cottage, the plainclothes detective from London, he doesn’t see the cars pulling up over the brow of the hill, shimmering in the near distance. He doesn’t know that I’m prepared to go to prison to atone for my sins, and to ensure that he does too.

All he sees is me. His first wife. His only true wife. The wife who would do anything for him. Literally anything. Except this.

I take a step to the side and let them come for him.