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“I don’t know how you didn’t punch her,” says Amelia, as Cassie lies on the grass bank outside her caravan. Amelia’s mum is entertaining inside.

“I didn’t know who to hit first: him or her,” says Cassie, still in bitter denial that Ben was there for Nicole instead of her. She’d known there was every chance he would have been, bearing in mind they’d been sneaking around behind her back for the past month or so, but when she saw him standing in her living room, she’d still dared to believe that she was the reason for his visit. After all, how could Ben and Nicole’s relationship have survived everything she’d thrown at it?

She’d known it was him the moment she picked up the phone extension to listen in to Nicole’s conversation. And she thought she was going to throw up.

How was it even possible, she asked herself again and again. Was someone playing a sick game? Had their father got Nicole to set it up in the hope that it would deter Cassie from pursuing a relationship that he quite clearly disapproved of?

Her confusion had turned to pain, and pain had metamorphosed into an anger unlike anything she’d ever known. How dare they deceive her? How could the two people she loved more than anything in the world do that to her?

She’d imagined Ben ingratiating himself into their lives: picking her up from school in his limo, sitting at the family table for Sunday lunch, exchanging presents under the Christmas tree. But in all those fantasies, he was with her . The idea that he might do all those things but go to Nicole ’s bed every night tore Cassie in two and left her entrails trailing behind her whenever she tried to put one foot in front of the other. It couldn’t happen that way—she wouldn’t allow it.

She’d thought that inventing a kiss-’n’-tell story for The Sun would be enough to detonate a bomb under their burgeoning relationship. She’d reveled in making up all the sordid details, imagining herself in the place of the naked girl from whose breasts Ben had allegedly snorted cocaine. When Cassie saw it in print the next day, she’d almost convinced herself it had actually happened, and she’d enjoyed watching her sister’s discomfort as she relayed Ben’s supposed indiscretion, safe in the knowledge that Nicole’s pride and dignity would never allow her to be treated that way.

But then he had turned up at their house in the middle of the night, begging for Nicole to give him another chance. Cassie had sat at the top of the stairs in the darkness, listening to their hushed conversation in disbelief as he told her sister, the one person Cassie thought she could depend on, that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

It had taken all her resolve not to tear down the stairs and launch herself at them, not only because her hatred was so fierce that she was afraid of what she might be capable of, but because she knew it would only drive them further underground, and she needed them out in the open, where she could see them, so she could destroy whatever it was they’d convinced themselves they had.

She’d had to wait a few more days, and when the call came, she couldn’t help but be disappointed to hear Nicole cave into his never-ending attempts to justify himself—not only because her sister clearly wasn’t the woman she thought she was, but because it meant Cassie would have to go one step further to drive a stake into their relationship, once and for all.

On the day Nicole had agreed to meet Ben at the Langham hotel, Amelia had called her, posing as his assistant. She’d managed to work her wily ways and get a room for an hour—Cassie didn’t ask what she’d had to do—and had ensconced herself, posing as Ben’s “girlfriend” while he was supposedly in the “shower,” so that Cassie could go and reclaim the relationship Nicole was seemingly so intent on stealing. But she hadn’t reckoned on Ben’s resilience and his love for her sister.

“So, what are you going to do now?” asks Amelia, chewing on her nail.

Cassie fixes her with an intense stare, wondering how much she should share. “What would you do?”

Amelia puffs out her cheeks. “If I found out Michael had screwed my sister, I’d cut off his balls and force her to watch.”

Cassie wonders if the same would apply if she knew he was also capable of raping her best friend.

“You can’t let them get away with it,” Amelia goes on.

“I’m not intending to,” says Cassie, not knowing whether she’s referring to Ben, Nicole, or Michael, though in her mind they’re all equally deserving of the punishment that’s about to be unleashed upon them.

“So, what’s the plan?” asks Amelia, her eyes darkening as the man she knows only as “Uncle” rounds the corner of the caravan.

“What you gonna kill her with today?” she calls out, her tone loaded with abject hostility.

He offers a black-toothed grin as he climbs the steps. “Whatever she wants to make the pain go away,” he says, making it sound as if he’s there for the good of her mum’s health. “You want some?”

The girls look at each other, the unspoken words banging a drum in Cassie’s head, as she wonders why she hasn’t thought of it before.