She reads the email.
‘I saved money. I found a house for us and I was waiting to hear about the school for you. And I was applying for jobs.’
‘When were we leaving?’
‘I was waiting for your father to go to Zurich.’
Her face goes through a range of expressions as the reality dawns on her. ‘We were leaving while he was in Zurich?’
‘Yes.’
I show her everything – the applications, the email I’d drafted for the lawyer.
She sits there, in shock.
I put my phone away. She folds in two; her face falls. She cries again. I grab the box of tissues from the coffee table and hand it to her. I know what she’s thinking. This is the worst news, really. To know she was so close to freedom, and then…
‘There’s another thing,’ I say. ‘Teri isn’t who she says she is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you remember when your dad had an affair?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s her.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. Her real name is Beatrice. Wait here.’
I go upstairs to my bedroom and retrieve the note I found in Teri’s house. I bring it back downstairs, holding it by a corner. ‘Remember this?’
She frowns at it. ‘That’s not the note Dad had. There’s no kiss on it.’
‘That’s right. Teri had this one.’
Her face wobbles. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘I went rummaging through her bedroom.’
‘Why were you going through her bedroom?’
‘I was looking for her laptop to delete the video she took of you. I was going to steal it and… I don’t know. Crack the password somehow.’
‘But she deleted the video.’
‘No, it’s in the cloud. She told me.’
‘But why would she keep it?’
I put the note on the coffee table and sit back down. ‘She wanted money. Or that’s what I thought. She kept threatening to give the video to the police unless I gave her twenty-five thousand pounds.’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t realise who she was then. But now it turns out it’s not about money anyway. She’s trying to make me leave. She’s in love with your dad and she thinks that if I get out of the picture, they’ll be together.’ I tell her how Teri faked the accident. ‘You never actually hit her. Scarlett told me how slowly you were going and that you’d put the brakes on by the time she stepped out in front of you. But it would have been really confusing for you. She seemed to be really hurt. But it was all an act.’
She looks at me with eyes like saucers. ‘It was an act?’
