Kindle Notes & Highlights
306,000 people, including children, were reported missing in the UK, which is an average of 838 per day. Thirty-six percent of those are adults and eighty-nine percent of missing people are found or return home within forty-eight hours.
If Kevin had killed or kidnapped Gemma (he knew he hadn’t) he wouldn’t have driven outside Bristol to dispose of the body. If he had had any intelligence at all, he would have done, but from the look of his photograph, he had very little.
As he looks at the photograph and into Kevin’s eyes, he sees that he quite possibly bears the typical characteristics of somebody with a secret: haunted eyes, stone-faced expression. It would be easy to suspect such a man of murdering his own stepdaughter.
She can work practically anywhere, utilising whatever means she finds necessary and so long as the jobs get done and her boss kept informed, she will always have work and money. And she needs money. Her drinking career depends on it.
she will always have work and money. And she needs money. Her drinking career depends on it.
The woman is a ghost, a person related to the part of his life she has no right to. Gemma herself only knows one side to the man, ten years her senior, who is married and has children and yet cannot seem to keep his distance from her. Until now she has been able to pretend that no other side to him exists and that there is only him and her, but now she can’t.
Lee wonders if a person’s future is already mapped out for them. That somewhere deep down, everyone knows what is going to happen; that life is not a journey, not a batch of occurrences that we are meant to learn and grow from, but that we are all heading towards the final denouement. One we already know is coming.
The metal door is unbolted, opened, and standing in front of him is a chunky female police officer, her uniform slightly too tight for her bust, giving her the impression of a sausage, squeezed
too tight in its skin.
or that Fiona isn’t the light in their beautiful house, but the darkness. A woman filled with so much hate and jealousy that she’ll do anything to keep her home spotless, her children well dressed and her husband fed. She will go to the ends of the Earth just to make others believe that her life is perfect. Appearances can be deceptive.
he’s trying to tell her something. That he’s trying to off-load some secret she’s not prepared to hear. Not here. Not now. Not in her home where she’s safe.
When her mum had grown weaker and her face took on the pale sickness that she remembered her nan wore before she passed away, Gemma tried to pretend she could not see death rearing its ugly head and coaxing her mum towards its grip.
Little snippets of their conversation the night before beg to be set free from her still murky brain.
But how can a man accept blame if there are never any consequences? That’s what Gemma often wonders, but she can never tell anyone.
His parents willing participants in the ultimate crime: denial.
They were all being roped into their relationship in one way or another, and unless they left tomorrow morning, they always would be. Their web of deception is being blown apart by the wind like a spider’s web. Disintegrating before her eyes, and there is only one way out that she can see.
