Page 91 of Outlier

“Your bloody husband told her that she was a mistake, and as soon as he said that, she started screaming, and she wouldn’t stop. She was just screaming, screaming,screaming.”

“What did you do to her?” Margot whispered.

I glanced at Rebecca.

She was looking at Mum, her face now pale.

“What was I supposed to do? She wouldn’t shut up. Dickhead Duke took off, and I was left with this crazy freak. Nothing worked—I shook her, smacked her, but she just carried on screaming. I had to do something.”

“You shook her and smacked her?” Margot’s voice was rising now. “Did it ever occur to you to hug her?”

“Hugher? Are you joking? Reward that mental behaviour? No way.” Colour had risen in Mum’s face now, and her hands were balled into fists at her sides. “The neighbours could hear. It was horrendous. I did the only thing I could think of.”

My chest tightened as my throat closed over. It was like I was back there again. The cold walls, the spiders, the terror of being left alone, of not knowing when Mum would come back.

“What did you do?” Margot repeated, almost in a whisper.

“I locked her in the basement,” Mum said through gritted teeth. “And I let her out when she?—”

“When I stopped screaming,” I managed to say around my tight throat.

The room was frozen in horrified silence.

“You let me out when I stopped screaming. But it wasn’t you that let me out, Mum.”

“It was my idea to send Vicky to stay with you, Margot,” Gareth’s voice sounded from the front door, and we all turned to him.

He walked in and closed it behind him, dropping his keys onto a side table before he turned back to the kitchen. He looked older than when I last saw him, defeated.

“When I came home and saw what Janet had…” His voice broke at the end of that sentence as he shook his head and then looked at Mum. “I made excuses for you. You hid the worst of it from me, but I made excuses for how you treated that girl. But when I came home that day… and I asked where she was. The house was silent, and you wouldn’t tell me. When I finally found her and let her out, the silence wasdeafening.”

“That’s when you stopped speaking,” Margot said as she turned to me.

To my shock, I could see that her eyes were filled with tears, which she quickly swiped away before turning to my mother and Gareth.

“You sent me that traumatised little girl with no warning.”

“Vicky was a shell of herself when I found her in that basement. Her eyes had this unfocused look of terror in them, and there were bruises on her arms,” Gareth said in a low voice. “I thought it was a one-off. I thought that Janet must be under too much stress and just snapped; that she needed a break. I thought with some time out of this house, Vicky would recover, and… and the truth is, I couldn’t bear her silence.” He turned to me. “I let you down, cariad. I’m so sorry.”

He dropped his head in shame then, and I made myself move to him, putting my hand on his arm, just like Lottie would do for me.

“You were always kind to me,” I told him. “That’s not letting me down. That was important to me.”

He shook his head. “I should have protected you, love.”

“Protected her from what?” Mum snapped. “Fromme? For goodness sake. She was only locked down there for a few hours. And so what if she had a few bruises? I had to restrain her—she was like a wild animal.”

“I’m sorry too, Victoria,” muttered Rebecca.

My shocked gaze flew to her.

Rebecca never apologised.

She darted me an uncomfortable look. Her pale cheeks had reddened now, and she was shifting uncomfortably on her feet.

“I was a bitch to you. I didn’t know about the basement thing but?—”

“You were a year younger than me, Rebecca,” I told her. “None of that is your fault.”