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Dusk is falling by the time I get home, and the darkening skies create an ominous aura. But there’s nothing to suggest that my family are under siege or that my house is under surveillance. The windows are devoid of movement and light, and Hank’s unmarked car sits idly across the street.

“Has anything changed?” I ask as I slip into the back seat.

He shakes his head without taking his eyes off the porch.

“Not since I went inside and checked,” he says. “Which was about an hour ago.”

“And you’re sure that nothing was amiss?” I ask, my words strangled by the panic in my chest. “There was no sign of anything untoward in Hannah’s bedroom? No sign of anything being out of place?”

“Not as far as I could see. Everything looked as it always does.”

But Cassie had been there. I’d seen it with my own two eyes.

“Still no luck in getting hold of Brad on the cell phone?” Hank asks, looking at me in the rearview mirror. I shake my head.

“Listen, I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation,” he says, attempting to assuage my agitation. “They may have taken the boat out and lost track of time.”

I nod, grateful for the reassurance.

Perhaps Cassie wasn’t in my house after all. Maybe that’s what I chose to see as the photo flashed up on Zoe’s phone, my levels of suspicion knowing no bounds. It looked like Hannah’s room; I was sure it was her bed that Cassie had been grinning sadistically from, but maybe I was wrong.

“I’m sorry to have called you out,” I say, hating that my paranoia has wasted his time.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” asks Hank.

I force a smile. “No, I’m fine. I’ll keep trying Brad, and if they’re not home by nightfall I’ll give you a call.”

The place that I’ve called home for the past twenty years doesn’t feel quite the same, knowing that Cassie may have infiltrated it. I walk from room to room, turning the lights on, but the warm glow leaves me cold.

“Where are you?” I say out loud to the photo of the three of us that hangs in the hall.

I’m suddenly blindsided by the memory of Brad’s threat to take Hannah to his parents’ and force myself to acknowledge that, if he has, it would only be because her safety is paramount. And despite myself, I can’t help but reason that it might be the best place for her right now. I take my phone from my pocket and call my in-laws.

“Betty, it’s Nicole,” I say, trying to sound as much like myself as I can. I wonder if Brad’s told her what’s been going on—I guess he would have had to, if he’s taken Hannah there.

“Oh, hey there,” she says, in her Southern drawl. “How y’all doing?”

Nothing about her suggests that she knows anything more about me than she did the last time we spoke, when she’d politely passed up my offer to make cornbread for the holidays. And nothing about her suggests that Brad and Hannah are there.

“We’re good. I just wanted to double-check whether you needed me to bring anything next week.” Now that I know she’s blissfully unaware, I don’t want to alarm her.

“Just your good selves,” she says, cheerily.

“OK, great,” I say, needing to move on to my next line of inquiry. “Actually, can I call you back? Hannah’s just got home.”

Tapping the side of my phone, I will myself to think rationally about where else they might be. They may have gone out on the water, but it’s unlike Brad not to get back before sunset, especially given that one of the lights is out on the boat—but he bought a new one last weekend. Maybe they’ve gone to fit it and put it to the test.

I let myself into the garage, knowing that’s where he’d put it, hopeful that if it’s missing, there’s every chance that Hank might be right. I reach for the light switch and, as the fluorescent bulb flickers to attention, it takes me a moment longer than it should to realize that Brad’s truck is there.

He’d never go anywhere without it. He wouldn’t know how to.

I shudder as my eyes travel to the ceiling, wishing I could see into our bedroom above so that I don’t have to go up there.

I back out into the hall and look up the stairs, the gloom of the landing suddenly menacing. Brad can’t be up there; Hank would have found him. Yet his pickup can’t be here without him.

Despite several attempts, the landing light stays woefully idle, and my throat dries up as I contemplate the darkness that awaits. Every tread I take feels as if it’s lifting me toward somewhere I don’t want to go, even though it’s a journey I’ve happily made a million times before.

I let out the breath I’d been holding when our bedroom light turns on the first time. I scan the empty room, but the oppressive feeling of not being alone sits like a weight on my chest.

I want to call out, desperate to hear Brad answer back, but fear chokes me into staying silent.

As I gingerly make my way along the landing toward Hannah’s room, I trail my hand along the wall for support. Her curtains are open, and the moon’s muted glow radiates across her bed. It must be a trick of the light, but it looks like she’s actually in it, the shimmer rising and falling with the shadows.

“ Hannah? ” I half whisper, an irrational part of me not wanting to wake her if she’s asleep.

I take a step closer, my eyes adjusting to the familiar outlines in the room. My hand reaches out to touch what still looks like a Hannah-shaped mound in the bed, but just as my fingers meet the fabric of her duvet cover, there’s a dull thud from above me.

My pulse hammers in my ears, drowning out any remote possibility that I might have imagined the noise coming from the attic. As if on autopilot, I numbly put one foot in front of the other as I move toward the ceiling hatch on the landing. The window pole that we use to unhook it and pull the ladder down isn’t where it should be, so I revert to Plan B and drag a chair across the rug, snagging it on the corner. I pretend to inspect the hatch, but I’m just playing for time; delaying the inevitability of having to go up into a dark, confined space, knowing it would have been the one place Hank wouldn’t have looked.

I know I have to go up there, for no reason other than to free my tortured mind of the thought that Hannah is being held against her will—and that I’m close enough to save her.

The metal ladder grinds against itself as I pull it down and lock it into place. I force a deep breath in and out of my lungs but feel momentarily suffocated as they struggle to inflate.

“Hello?” I offer pathetically, my voice not sounding like my own, as I stare up into the void.

My legs feel like jelly as they attempt to lift themselves up onto each rung, and I grip with whitened knuckles to keep myself balanced.

I stop, the top of my head level with the opening, knowing that the next step will either expose or assuage my darkest fears.

My eyes blink as they adjust to the cavernous space, delving into the pitch-black corners, searching for life. I sense it before I see it; the heat of an uninvited presence—the sickening realization that I’m not alone.

“Do you remember when we used to make a camp in the loft?” asks a voice, its sinister tone at odds with the childlike question. My chest tightens, restricting the rise and fall of my breath. “We’d smuggle all the treats up there and pretend we’d left home.”

There’s a flicker of light as a match is struck, and the wick of an oil lantern ignites. The burning flame sets Cassie’s face aglow with an amber hue.

“What do you want?” I croak, desperately willing my voice not to reveal my terror. “Where’s Hannah?”

My eyes follow the light as Cassie wordlessly moves to the far corner of the attic, where it settles upon a makeshift tent made out of bedsheets and broomsticks.

“I thought I’d show her what me and Mummy used to do for fun,” she says.

My legs buckle beneath me as my feet blindly move across the uneven floorboards toward Hannah. I picture her in there, surrounded by the soft toys she calls friends, offering them imaginary tea and cakes from the play set Brad’s mother bought her.

I want to claw at the linen, tear down this wolf in sheep’s clothing, expose the malevolence that’s being sickeningly disguised as an innocent adventure. But I stop myself, not wanting to impart my abject terror to a little girl who will wonder why I ruined her game.

“Hannah?” I choke, peering in. The muted light casts long shadows, but I can immediately tell she’s not in there.

“Where is she?” I demand. “What have you done with her?”

Cassie lets out a hollow laugh. “What makes you think I would? A guilty conscience? ”

“She’s just a child,” I say, appealing for mercy.

“Weren’t we all?” comes the bitter reply. “Once upon a time.”

“Whatever this is, whatever you want, keep her out of it. No good can come from involving her.”

A barbed sneer of contempt rattles at the back of Cassie’s throat. “How did you think you were any more deserving of Dad’s estate than me?”

“I didn’t,” I say. “I always believed I was as much at fault as anyone—that I was responsible for what happened to Michael, to Ben… to you . For years, I’ve thought that if I hadn’t got the drugs, you wouldn’t have found them, Ben wouldn’t have given them to Michael and he wouldn’t be dead. That cycle of events has been on repeat in my head every second of every day since—as much as I’ve tried to forget it.”

I fight to stop my jaw from spasming, my pent-up fury at what she had led me to believe at odds with needing to keep Hannah safe at all costs.

“But to find out that Ben had nothing to do with it…”

“You’ll never be able to prove that he didn’t give Michael the drugs,” says Cassie, her tone brimming with gauche joviality.

I grit my teeth as I remember Ben’s desperate pleas to the jury, willing them to believe that he hadn’t been in Michael’s room, that he didn’t know how his jacket had got there, that he would never have given him drugs, that he hadn’t touched them himself in over a year…

“I may not be able to prove that you gave Michael the drugs,” I say. “But Dad’s letter proves that you were there, that you watched Michael die, that both of you allowed Ben to take the blame.”

“I think you’ve forgotten what you stand to lose,” hisses Cassie. “Not just here and now, but in a court of law. Whichever way you try to spin it, it was your drugs that killed a man.”

I chastise myself for my weakness, for not doing the right thing back when I had the chance to change the course of events. When I should have owned up to what I’d done, instead of seeing the man that I loved go to prison for something I suspected, deep down, he was innocent of. Ben didn’t take drugs. He would never have fed Michael’s addiction. So how had I allowed myself to believe he would? Because otherwise I would have been forced to acknowledge that Cassie had lied—and that she was capable of so much more than I was prepared to accept.

“I’m not afraid to tell the truth anymore,” I say to her. “I’m tired of running away from it. And if I have to pay my dues for Ben to be vindicated, then so be it. But know that I’ll be taking you down with me.”