Page 62 of The Happy Family

‘The lie I told back at the hospital after I woke up from my coma,’ I say before shushing Jude, who is starting to cry, but only because he senses his mother’s angst. ‘The lie about not being able to remember my accident.’

It starts to dawn on Luna what this is all about.

‘That’s right. I remember everything,’ I say smugly. ‘How you dragged me into the garage. How you wanted to kill me when you realised I knew the truth about you. And how I ran but slipped before I could make it to the stairs.’

Luna stares at me, her mouth open, aghast at how I fooled her and everybody else.

‘Surprise, surprise, bitch,’ I say, and I laugh at her.

Then I resettle Jude in my arms, trying to get him to stop crying. As I do that, Luna suddenly gets as serious as I am.

‘Give me back my baby,’ she says, stepping towards me.

‘Don’t you dare get any closer to me,’ I say, and my threat is implied, even if it is unspoken. I have her baby, so she has to do what I say. Or else.

‘You won’t hurt him,’ Luna says, calling my bluff.

‘You’re right. I won’t. That’s because I would never harm another human being. Not willingly, anyway. But you, on the other hand, have no problem harming people. Isn’t that right, loopy Luna?’

I see the flicker of emotion behind her eyes at using that nickname.

‘Admit it,’ I say. ‘You’re crazy. You’re a stalker. You’re a murderer.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I’ll make you a deal,’ I say. ‘You tell me how you did it all and I will leave here without calling the police.’

That sounds like a fair deal to me, but Luna has a counter-offer.

‘I wouldn’t let you call the police,’ she snaps back. ‘And I won’t let you leave either. Not if you really do remember everything like you say you do.’

I make sure to stay calm, though on the inside, I am pleased to see that Luna seems to be showing her true self, finally.

‘Oh, Sadie. What have you done?’ she asks me with a laugh. ‘I’ll give you credit. You genuinely had me fooled with the whole amnesia thing. But you’ve just gone and ruined it all by giving yourself away. You had the element of surprise on your side, but this is how you choose to use it? I’m sorry to tell you, but you have totally misplayed your hand if that’s so.’

Luna is now the one looking smug as she thinks that I have totally botched my big masterplan. Is she right?

‘You think that holding my baby makes you safe?’ she asks me then. ‘Because it doesn’t. I know you won’t hurt Jude because you don’t have it in you to do such a thing. You know as well as I do that I’m the only one out of the two of us who is capable of doing bad things. So stop being silly and put Jude down. Then we can deal with this woman to woman. How does that sound?’

‘If I put him down, there will be nothing stopping you reaching for one of those knives and killing me,’ I say, glancing over at the six sharp knives that sit in the rack very close to where Luna stands.

‘There’s nothing stopping me anyway,’ Luna says with a shrug. ‘I can kill you anytime I want. You’re lucky you’re still alive now. But this is when your luck runs out.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I say. ‘You’ve tried to kill me before and failed. Like the time you tried to lure me to the woods, pretending to be Reid with the kids, when really, you were there alone, looking to entrap me. Then, of course, you tried to kill me on the night of my accident. But you failed again. Last but not least, you were standing there in my hospital room when I woke up from my coma, which makes me think that you were in there to try and kill me a third time, but that was another failure too. Am I right?’

‘You’re not wrong,’ Luna concedes. ‘But don’t let my past mistakes fool you into thinking you are invincible, because you’re not. Nobody is. Well, nobody except me, of course.’

I watch as Luna reaches for the knives and picks one up by the handle.

The one with the biggest blade.

‘The only thing you did succeed at was silencing Gemma,’ I say to her. ‘That was you, wasn’t it? You killed her.’

‘She had to go,’ comes the cold response as Luna eyes up the knife in her possession.

‘I just want to know why you did it,’ I say as Jude wriggles in my arms. ‘Why you targeted my family? Why us?’

‘You really don’t see it, do you?’ Luna replies. ‘How you had it all. You had everything a woman could possibly want. The husband. The children. The house. The cars. The lifestyle. You took it for granted, but not me. I saw what you had, and it was my dream to have it for myself. So that’s what I did. I took it from you, and it worked. Now I have the life you had and you have nothing, just like the old me. Only now do you realise what you had to lose, but it’s far too late to get it back.’