‘Okay, thank you,’ says Josh, kindly but firmly moving her along.
I give him a grateful smile, reach under the table and take Ada’s hand, squeezing it in mine. She squeezes back, her smile fixed as she greets the next reader. I sign the book on autopilot, caught in the memory of paramedics dragging Ada from me the night Wisteria burned. Laying her out on the freezing January earth. Hearing one of them say there was a pulse, faint, so very, very faint, but there. The warm honey-sweet relief that she was alive, that I’d heaved her from the house. In the hospital, when she was finally awake, she thanked me for saving her.
‘No,’ I told her. ‘You saved me.’
She smiled weakly, my big sister so small in her bed, so pale and bruised. ‘We saved each other.’
A woman who is all sharp angles and a slash of red lipstick coolly hands her book to me and tells me her name is Stephanie. She turns to Ada. ‘Your letters to Elodie are beautiful.’
Ada’s letters, slipped between the pages of my prose, are the chapters most loved by our readers. Three years ago, that would’ve sent me into a tailspin of jealousy. Now, though, all I feel is pure, undiluted pride.
It wasn’t long after Wisteria burned that Ada’s car, along with Seefer and all the letters Ada had written to me, was found. In the days that followed, I sat beside her hospital bed, wires and tubes running in and out of her skin, and devoured every one of her penned entries. With each one I read, I unwrapped her, layer by layer like pass the parcel until I found my sister inside. The true her, not the too-shiny, perfect wife she pretended to be.
Ada smiles now, colour creeping into her cheeks. ‘Thank you, Stephanie.’
It’s moments like these I am glad Ada finally convinced me to write One Small Mistake. The media coverage of my disappearance meant I had my pick of publishers, just as Jack had predicted. Everything I thought I’d ever wanted was proffered to me on a silver platter, but it may as well have been a rotting, writhing dish of maggots. It had lost its appeal.
Until Ada.
‘I’ve been reading your work since you were a child. You’re talented, Ellie-Bee,’ she told me at the hospital. ‘For years, Jack manipulated you, isolated you from me, from our family. He took away Noah. Tried to take me too. Please, do not let Jack Westwood take this as well.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘If you can help just one woman recognise the red flags, maybe you can save her from her own Jack.’
She was right. But I couldn’t finish the book without Ada. The truth is, my story was never about me and Jack. It was about us. Me and my sister. It always was. ‘I heard you’re donating all your profits to a mental health charity,’ Stephanie says, snatching me from my thoughts. She enquires casually, as though my response doesn’t matter, but her focus on me is pin-sharp, the way Jack’s was when he was hunting that deer. ‘Is it true?’
I cast around for Josh. He normally swoops in to field difficult questions, but he is uncharacte?ristically absent. I finish scribbling my message and slide the book across to Ada, deciding to answer her honestly. ‘It is.’
‘Because you think Jack was mentally ill? Or because his dad was? I suppose Jack may never have done what he did if it wasn’t for how Jeffrey treated him, do you agree?’
I don’t want to profit from Jack’s death. From my abduction. And the reluctant part I played in it. That’s why I turned down an astronomical amount of money for interviews and television appearances. That’s why I turned down a career as Elodie Fray, author, and the tremendous advance Harriers offered for a follow-up novel to One Small Mistake. That’s why every penny I made from this book has been donated. But I do not tell this to the stranger in front of me because everything I’m willing to share about me and Jack and Wisteria Cottage, everything that can help other women avoid repeating my mistakes, is in the pages of this book. So I give her a non-committal shrug, trying to mask the unease that prickles across my skin in the face of her questions, and hold out Stephanie’s copy to her.
She doesn’t take it. ‘You work at Somerset Rape Crisis Centre. Why is that?’
Shock rises through me like saliva before vomit. In a bid to keep my new life private, only a handful of carefully selected people know where I work. Where I live. Beside me, Ada tenses.
‘Are you hoping for redemption after putting your family, friends and the rest of the nation through hell? How do you feel about David Taylor being charged as an accomplice? Do you regret killing Jack?’
I am the unwilling assistant tied to a spinning target. She is a seasoned knife thrower, flinging her questions at me like flying daggers. Only, they are intended to impale. And they do. Each one slices and tears and lodges bone-deep. The guilt that sits across my chest in a steel band tightens and I can’t draw breath.
‘She didn’t put us through hell. Jack did,’ Ada snaps. ‘He had her kidnapped from her own bed. The choice he gave her in the woods wasn’t ever a choice. He would’ve taken her to Wisteria either way because he was in too deep, and he wanted her. He was obsessive and controlling and killing him was the only way she could save us both.’
Immediately I am overcome with the memories of that night. The people around me turn to ash and I am being dragged back to Wisteria.
‘Of course she doesn’t regret it,’ retorts Ada.
Tippies. I am in Tippies Bookshop. I am not trapped inside the cottage. Breathing deeply, I wipe my damp palms against my dress. Sweat, I remind myself, not blood.
Stephanie hasn’t taken her eyes off me. She is looking for something, trying to turn over a boulder at the bottom of me to examine all the things I battle to keep hidden. And she finds them. The guilt that turns my face into my pillow at 3 a.m. to muffle the endless sobs. Moments of missing Jack that are so fierce, they become a physical ache. Moments of hating him for what he did, what he tried to do, that are so vivid, they burn. And the regret that I took his life, that I couldn’t find a better way, thuds through me like a second heartbeat.
‘Do you deserve this book deal, Elodie?’ asks Stephanie.
I swallow. There is only so long you can ignore your critics, the ones who post about you online and fire off death threats and hate to your inbox. There is only so long you can ignore the voice inside your head that tells you they are right. Now, I am faced with both, and I am silent because I’m sure I deserve her barbed questions.