Her eyes widen.
‘Now what do you make ofthat, Davis?’
FORTY-SIX
ERIN
I clasp my hand tightly over my mouth, but it’s no good. I can’t stop it from coming.
Groaning, I open the car door, lean out, and empty my guts out all over the pavement below –whoosh!
My eyes water as I retch, my whole body violently spasming and heaving and sweating as it expels the contents of my stomach – around £120 worth of contents, last night’s overindulgent supper,includingice cream. My head starts spinning as I begin to hyperventilate, struggling to catch my breath between intermittent bursts of vomiting.
‘Hey, you OK?’ A woman stops as she’s walking past, her brow crinkled in concern. She makes to come towards me but, seeing the mess I’ve made over the side of the road, takes a step back.
‘Mm-hm’ is about all I can manage in response. ‘Stomach bug…’ I croak, doubled over.
‘Yeah, there’s a lot of it about at the moment.’ She gives me a sympathetic, lopsided smile, hands me a bottle of water, stretching her arm out as far as it can go to avoid getting too close.
‘You don’t look well. You should go home to your bed.’
‘Yes… thanks.’ I nod gratefully. ‘I will.’
But there’s no chance of that happening. Not after what I’ve just seen.
At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me and that it was a mirage as I watched them both, saying their goodbyes by the door, like someone stranded in the burning heat of a vast desert sees a stream in the distance. I thought that perhaps I was just seeing what Iwantedto see. Only there was no mistaking it was her.
I recognised herimmediately, even though she looks so different, a far cry from the glamorous blonde bombshell I remember her being. Her hair is now mousey brown and hangs in lank curtains around her noticeably thinner face, and she’s dressed in the mostawfulclothes – a shapeless grey cardigan and baggy leggings – clothes that ordinarily shewould never be seen dead in – though today just may well be the exception to that rule.
Samantha Valentine.
I gulp back some water with a shaking hand, spilling it down my front as I swallow greedily.
I’ve been dreaming and fantasising about this moment for seven years now, the moment when I would finally see her again. And yet now it’s here, now this day really has actually materialised, I feel paralysed, unable to move,unable to think.
I watched them as they’d embraced at the door, watched as Dan had made his way down the pathway towards his car. As he was about to step inside, he stopped, turned and waved at her, like an old friend.
‘I’ll see you soon, Tilly!’
Tilly?
Oh.My.God. It hits me hard, like a hammer to the back of my skull.Tilly Ward?I feel sick again. ‘Ohno…’ I clutch mymouth, willing the nausea to pass. I don’t want to throw up in the hire car – they’ll charge me.
Samantha Valentine is Tilly Ward.
I sit in the driver’s seat, motionless for a moment as I try to let it sink in.
‘My God!’ I breathe the words aloud. Yet again, she’s fooled everyone, including me,including Dan Riley. By default though, he has at least fulfilled the role I had hoped he would, and led me to her. I take it back – I was right to choose him all along. I glance at the burner phone in my tote bag and, bizarrely, think about calling him. Instinctively, I want to give him the heads-up, tell him who Tilly Wardreallyis and how she’s tricked him, how she’s deceived and manipulated him into believing her cock-and-bull story, just as she did me. In a sudden burst of rage, I bang the steering wheel with my hand, over and over until it hurts so much that I scream.That evil bitch!
It was all becoming clear now, horribly so. Ithadbeen deliberate, all of it, planned and plotted and executed with aplomb. She had killed Milo Harrison and blamed Samantha Valentine, my supposed fictitious friend, my ‘other self’. She must have known that I had been released from Larksmere and wanted to make sure I could never come after her with the truth, never try to expose her, by framing me for a murder she deliberately committed to silence me. I was right; she had to have planted my hair at the crime scene, to try to incriminate me, turn the spotlight onto me, mad Erin Santos, the crazy woman who was a pathological liar. In what is perhaps the most twisted part of all though, in a bid to ensure that I’d be held accountable and thrown back in the nuthouse, she’d committed her own crimeon herself. She was playing both the victimandthe perpetrator.
I take a breath, scrabble around in my tote bag for my lipstick and a hairbrush.
‘You can do this, Erin.’ My voice sounds oddly detached as I talk to myself out loud – maybe I reallyamgoing mad. Laughter suddenly bubbles up out of me. If that psycho bitch wants to see madness, then I’ll damn well give it to her!
Finish this, Erin, you can finish this once and for all.
As I start to rake the brush through my frazzled hair, I’m thinking of all those years I have spent holed up in that hospital – a place that makes a mockery of the word itself – hospitals are supposed to be safe places after all, places of nurture and care and comfort. Larksmere was none of these things. It was a cold, desperate, lonely place of pain and despair, the antithesis of care. No one cared about you in that hell pit. Frankly, I hope it burns to the ground.
