Prologue
Becca twisted the chocolate wrapper and tied it into a neat knot. Then another and another. Her eyes glanced at the double doors which led into the A & E department before checking the clock on the wall again. Almost forty minutes since her husband, Dean, had arrived and she’d been asked to wait outside. Their three-year-old daughter, Mia, was having tests, and the medical team had insisted that Becca stay in the waiting room to calm down, her agitation making her daughter more anxious than was necessary. To be fair, she had been screechy and loud when she thought she was being fobbed off again – but sometimes that sort of behaviour was needed for people to actually listen and take you seriously.
The waiting room was mercifully quiet, only a trickle of people coming in and going out. She watched them, her nurse’s eye trying to gauge what their problem might be, as a way of distracting herself from what was happening to her daughter. Were they taking the blood tests she had requested so many times now? Doing toxicology to see if they could identify what was causing these acute bouts of illness?
Her leg bounced up and down, her whole body twitching with the not knowing. Okay, she understood why they’d chosen Dean to go with Mia instead of her. He was calm, always calm, and she was so thankful he’d finally arrived at the hospital. But Becca was Mia’s mum, the one who looked after her most of the time, and she felt she should be there, making sure they were checking the right things, telling them the whole story. Dean hadn’t been there half the time Mia had been ill – he’d been working away, as was the norm these days.
She stood and did a tour of the walls, reading the posters, willing her heart to beat at a more sensible rate. What if it was something serious, some underlying condition that hadn’t occurred to her? She’d never forgive herself if it turned out to be an obvious disease. Something a district nurse should be aware of.
‘Becca.’ She turned at her name and saw Dean walking towards her, Mia holding his hand. His face was grim. ‘They want to have a chat with you.’ He nodded his head towards a doctor and nurse, who stood by the door of a little meeting room that opened off the waiting area.
‘Is everything okay? Do they know what’s wrong with her?’
A third person came bustling through the double doors. A woman with a stethoscope round her neck, but not in the white coat used by the A & E doctors. A consultant, Becca thought, her heart leaping up and down now, hands clammy.
Dean sat down and pulled Mia on to his knee. The three people were standing by the open door of the room, obviously waiting for her.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Becca asked him.
He shook his head, an odd expression on his face that she couldn’t quite interpret. ‘It’s just you they want to talk to.’
Mia snuggled into his chest, clearly exhausted.
Three of them? Oh God, no, this is serious.
She took a deep breath and steeled herself for bad news. I’m a nurse. I’ve heard bad news before. I can handle this. Giving them a tight smile, she walked into the room and sat in the chair they indicated. Waited while they introduced themselves, not really hearing anything as her pulse whooshed in her ears.
Silence.
‘Have you found out what’s wrong with my daughter?’
They glanced at each other and the woman with the stethoscope nodded. ‘Yes, we think we have.’
Becca waited.
‘We think someone has been deliberately poisoning her.’
Becca swallowed. Her skin prickled as she took in the stern faces, three pairs of eyes fixed on her.
Do they think it’s me?
1
Two and a half weeks earlier
Connor. Becca’s mind woke her up with his name, as if she’d just said it out loud. Maybe I did? Her heart gave a little skip of panic, eyes staring into the darkness, while she listened. Dean’s steady breathing, slow and regular, the slight rumble of a snore, filled her ears. The sound of a sleeping person. Even if I did say it, he didn’t hear. She breathed out, slow and quiet, worried that her rush of relief would be so loud it might wake her husband.
The digital clock, which sat on the bedside table next to her, clicked over to 3.08 a.m.
She turned away from the time, eyes closed as she snuggled against Dean’s back, but her mind was being treacherous, filling with images of Connor as she remembered him from ten years ago, just before she’d left. Surfer hair, bleached blond, hanging past his shoulders, that glorious wide smile, dark blue eyes and a wonky nose, bent slightly to the right after he’d been hit in the face by his surfboard several years earlier.
Connor.
There it was again, his name in her head, right where it shouldn’t be. Her eyes flicked open, not wanting to see his face in her mind but still wanting to revel in the warmth of the memory of him. Why now? she wondered, her nose full of the scent of her sleeping husband, her body clasped against his. Not that he’d notice, said a voice in her head, tinged with resentment. Her hand slipped from Dean’s waist and she turned on to her back, gazing at the ceiling, the flower-shaped light shade just visible in the darkness.
She listened to the rhythm of Dean’s breathing, noted his blissful lack of awareness and envied him his peace of mind. He could always sleep, was never awake at three in the morning, whereas this time of night was very familiar to her – a particular moment in time that her body seemed to want her to experience on a daily basis. Quietly, she slipped out of bed and pulled on her dressing gown before padding to the door. Not a conscious decision, but something she did out of habit. I won’t get back to sleep if I don’t have a wander, she told herself, a slave to her routines, which had started to multiply at an alarming rate.
She walked down the hallway and peeked into the next bedroom, smiling at the tangle of bedclothes on the floor, the little girl on the bed with her arms and legs flung wide, like a starfish. Mia. Strawberry-blonde curls formed a halo round her dainty face, freckles dotting her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Mini-me, Becca thought, having looked identical at the age of three. Now her own curls had straightened into shoulder-length waves, her hair darkened to brown, and her hazel eyes were permanently clouded with a whole swarm of worries that wouldn’t let her sleep.
Connor.
It was disconcerting, the way his name called to her, snapping her out of the present and taking her to the past. She’d lived in such a different world then, when he’d been part of her life, on a different continent, a different hemisphere. When she’d first met him, she’d been a carefree twenty-eight-year-old. Six months into her planned year-long sabbatical in Australia, she’d felt renewed and healed and invigorated, her head filled with such plans for the future. It felt surreal thinking about it now, as if it had happened in a parallel universe, and she wondered how she’d got here, to this place in her life where she felt like she was a chameleon, colouring herself to fit in, her true self unseen by the people she shared her life with.
She found herself in the kitchen, filling the kettle with water, no recollection of coming down the stairs. It was strange how her mind blanked like that, almost like sleepwalking. So tired, she thought, rubbing her hands over her face, wiping at eyes sticky with sleep. That was the irony: she was catatonic with weariness, but the moment she lay down, her mind went hyperactive, whirring through the day, the future, the past. Fixating on things she’d done that she wished she hadn’t, and things she hadn’t that she wished she had. All the should haves and could haves and what ifs banging together into a riot of voices shouting and crying and whispering in her head. Phew, it was noisy in there, and the only way to quieten everything down was to get up, have a cup of tea, do a bit of meditation and then go back to bed. Sometimes it worked. Recently, not so much.