Her Perfect Life: A gripping debut psychological thriller with a killer twist. Sam Hepburn

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      The microwave pings.

      ‘It’ll need a few minutes in the oven to get crispy,’ she says.

      He doesn’t move. She gives it a beat and says quietly, ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’

      He stands looking at the floor, gesturing helplessly with his hands. ‘You have to believe me, Gracie. I never meant it to happen.’

      She pushes at the rising dread. ‘Just tell me. Whatever it is we’ll deal with it.’

      He drops into one of the narrow steel-backed chairs he designed himself, his head down, his fingers pressing into his scalp; long, sensitive, blunt-nailed fingers that wear the slim platinum band that matches hers. She reaches for the moment when she slipped it over his knuckle, the pride and nervousness she’d felt as everyone they cared about looked on. Please, God, let it be a problem with money or work. Something that can be borne, or fixed, or forgotten.

      ‘I swear I didn’t plan it. I hardly know her.’

      ‘Her?’ The word spurts like vomit through her teeth. She knows then that this is beyond fixing or forgetting.

      ‘We’d just lost the tender. I was drunk. We all were.’

      She pictures the women she meets at ACP functions: attractive, smartly dressed women who smile at her and remember her name when she struggles to remember theirs, an eternity passing before she manages to whisper, ‘Who?’

      ‘One of the interns.’ Tom clenches his fists. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry. I was in a bad way. You know how much I had riding on that job.’

      All that fear, Gracie thinks. All that pain. It wasn’t enough to keep the precious things safe.

      ‘So you thought, oh, I know, I’ll fuck a twenty year old. That’ll cheer me up.’

      ‘No!’ His head hangs on his chest. ‘I lost it. I wanted to pass out, forget everything. Then someone called me a cab and suddenly there she was, telling me she’d always wanted to see the house.’

      She backs away, her head shaking slowly. ‘Not here, Tom. Please don’t tell me you slept with her here.’

      His hunched silence rips something inside her and all the quiet confidence she has built up over the years of her marriage comes spilling through the tear. She slithers down the wall, crushed by the realisation, stark and sudden, that the barrier between having everything and having nothing is as flimsy as a rejected blueprint.

      ‘Where was Elsie?’

      ‘Issy’s sleepover.’

      That pinpoints the night. Gracie sees herself finishing up at the studios and rushing off to eat sushi with the crew. Sipping sake, discussing the next day’s running order, catching a cab back to her hotel room. Sleeping alone. She raises her head. ‘Is she beautiful?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I said, is she beautiful?’

      ‘No! God, no.’ He says it vehemently, as if somehow this will exonerate him. ‘It wasn’t about that.’

      She looks around her at her home, her life, her husband. All she sees is a tumble of rubble. ‘So what was it about, Tom?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ He presses his palms against the bevelled edge of the table and sinks his head towards the green of the glass. ‘I felt empty, angry. I couldn’t face being on my own.’

      ‘Don’t you dare put this on me. Don’t you dare!’

      ‘I’m not …’ He throws back his head and drags in air. ‘When I sobered up I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I told her it was a mistake and she went crazy. She … threatened me. She said she’d tell you and the board if I didn’t let her work on one of my projects.’

      ‘So did you?’

      He swallows. ‘The Copenhagen clinic. But I won’t have to see her. I put her with the team working on the atrium and I’ve handed that side of things over to Geoff.’

      As if this is penance enough, he kneels down and reaches for her. Her hands fly out, pushing him away, startling them both with her strength. ‘You’d never have done this to Louise!’

      He jolts at the accusation, a shock response as if he’s been struck. She can see he’s steeled himself for fury, tears, distress. But not for this. She doesn’t care. He searches for words to deny it but the effort breaks him down into sobs. ‘It’s not about Louise.’

      ‘I’ve never been enough for you.’ She shunts away from him, pushing her heels against the slate floor. ‘I was always second best.’

      He crawls towards her, appalled, dumbfounded. ‘No! You’re you and Louise … was Louise.’

      She turns her head away, trying to hide her tears, but her fingers clutch her top, clawing the thin fabric in an effort to gain control. ‘And what about this bloody intern?’

      ‘She’s nothing.’

      ‘So you were willing to risk everything we have for some scheming little nothing?’

      ‘Christ, Gracie, what do you want me to say? I was drunk … I feel like shit …’

      ‘So that’s it? You got laid and she got a plus point on her CV?’

      He drops his head and scrapes his hand down his face. ‘It wasn’t just about getting on a project. She’d got it into her head that she and I had … some kind of future … and now she’s lashing out.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘She’s threatening to make a formal complaint.’ He closes his eyes. ‘To tell the board and the press a pack of lies about me offering her work, pretending I was going to leave you … getting her drunk and fuck knows what else.’

      Gracie waits until he looks at her. She stares into his eyes. Dark brown eyes, that shift and dither. There’s a screeching in her head, a feeling of weightlessness.

      ‘That’s what this confession is about, isn’t it? Damage limitation!’

      ‘No!’

      She throws back her head. ‘If you’d managed to buy her silence, you’d never have told me.’

      ‘Gracie—’

      She glares at him, daring him to lie.

      ‘I’ll do anything to make it up to you.’

      At least he hasn’t denied his cowardice. But the angle of his head and the tilt of his shoulders trigger a creep of suspicion. ‘How many others, Tom?’

      ‘Christ!’ He turns away, furious. ‘How can you even ask?’

      In that moment she sees a stranger. A lean-faced, dark-haired stranger in a black T-shirt and expensive jeans who has no idea that he has broken something СКАЧАТЬ