“Not my baby, not my problem.”
The woman—Greta—inhaled sharply. Then suddenly she raised her hand and slapped Savannah, right across the cheek, just like Savannah had slapped Jon earlier.
“What the—how dare you?”
“How dareyou. It’s one thing to want to punish Jon. And I get why you want to tell Susan. But ‘not my baby, not my problem’? What kind of person says that?”
Savannah understood the point. On a rational, objective level, she absolutely knew it was an awful thing to say. But the rage was so strong in that moment, she couldn’t and wouldn’t backtrack. Jon had lied about being married, then made a fool of her by asking this woman to turn up and play at being his wife. And now this woman had slapped her, in her own home. She’d had enough.
“Get out.”
Greta didn’t move.
“Get out of my house or I’m calling the police.”
Greta raised her hands in a gesture of surrender, skirted around Savannah and opened the front door.
“Don’t you dare go near Susan or Bella. If you do, I’ll be back, and it’ll be more than a slap.”
Greta slammed the door after her, leaving Savannah breathless and numb in the hall. How was this happening? In less than twenty-four hours, she’d been threatened by two unhinged strangers, despite having done nothing at all to warrant it. Slowly, she moved back into the kitchen.
In a daze, she searched for her phone. Fuck that woman and fuck Jon. They had no right to tell her what she could and couldn’t do. She was going to tell Susan. Where were her car keys? Oh, for god’s sake, Jon still had them. What an absolute tool. When she got her hands on him—
That’s when she heard someone at the front door.
97
Venetia
Thursday
Venetia’s heart had begun to race as soon as she saw the Instagram post on Thursday evening. She stared at her phone, blood rushing to her ears. There she was, Susan O’Donnell, smiling brightly for the camera. No more than a few hours since Venetia had taken her baby and lain it out in the garden. No more than a week since Aimee’s death. A group shot of a family meal. Not a care in the world. Her baby in her arms. Her family flocked around her. Her sister’s words in the caption:
So blessed to have my sisters in my life. I don’t know where I’d be without this lot. Not pictured, Greta, who is here most of the rest of the time. Pictured: Susan, my favorite younger sister, the baby of the family. Love is…people you care about most in the world, gathered together to eat and laugh.
Rage bubbled up inside Venetia. Aimee was dead, and this was what Susan and Leesa were doing. Jesus Christ. They didn’t care. They didn’t care one bit about Aimee, about Venetia, about Aimee’s unborn baby.Susan O’Donnell had broken Venetia’s life, shattered it to unmendable pieces, and she didn’t care.
The high she’d experienced earlier, leaving Susan’s baby on the lawn, had gone now. Dissolved by grief and a call with a funeral director, and now this. This happy-family photo.
Felipe had arrived at her shoulder, reading then wincing at the Instagram post. He followed her when she grabbed her car keys, asking her where she was going, begging her to stay put, to calm down.Calm down. What person alive has ever responded well tocalm down?
As she pulled on her boots, he pleaded some more. Claimed she was getting obsessed, that she’d end up back on heroin. That stopped her for a moment. A half-formed idea struck and she ran upstairs to the shoebox in her wardrobe, the one Felipe didn’t know she had. With a syringe in her pocket, she ran back downstairs and grabbed her jacket from the hall closet.
“Please, Venetia,” Felipe tried one more time.
“This is my problem, Felipe!” she hissed. “It has nothing to do with you!”
“It does. Apart from the fact that I care about you, I’m implicated. I was there. And I…helped.”
“You didn’t. You stood there with your hands over your eyes.”
“I…I helped cover up.”
“What?”
A sigh. “I’m the reason they think it was just the weight from the barbell that was used, why they’re not looking for the murder weapon and won’t find your DNA.”
“What did you do?”
