The shock of discovering that Max is actually Darcy’s brother freezes my brain for a moment. I stare open mouthed at her smug expression. My heart is still pounding and my legs are weak, yet I have to get away from them. Max’s arms encircle me. I try squirming free but his grip only tightens. I take a breath and start to scream. His massive hand comes over my mouth, squeezing my cheeks.

‘Make one more sound,’ Darcy says, ‘and I will cut you so bad your son won’t recognise your face.’ She holds the blade up to my nose as I stifle a whimper. Her words take the fight from my body. ‘Understand?’ she says.

I nod, and Max removes his hand from my mouth.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘Now we’ve got that sorted, let’s get back home. It’s arctic out here.’

Max leads me across the beach, back towards the house, both hands clamped around my shoulders. I can barely feel the cold any more. My body and my mind are numb. Defeated. Everything I tried to do was pointless. She had it all planned out. She’s ruined me. But why? Why the hell did she do it? I need to know. I have to find out.

Somewhere during my bid for freedom, I lost my hat, and now my hair whips around my face. Max and Darcy are quiet. There’s just the crash of the waves and the sound of my breath and heartbeats, of our soft footsteps out of time with one another.

‘Just tell me one thing,’ I ask, ‘Is Joe okay?’

‘Of course, he’s okay,’ Darcy says. ‘I told you, he and Ty are at the cinema. Honestly, he’s an eight-year-old child. What kind of person do you think I am?’

I don’t answer.

The white boundary wall of Darcy’s property comes into view, stark against the dark sand, and I instinctively slow down, knowing nothing good will come of going back inside. Max notices my hesitation and grips me tighter, urging me forward. I should fight, yell, try to escape, but Max is big and Darcy still has the knife in her hand. Please, God, don’t let her use it on me. I’m not ready to die. I want to see my son again. I want to see Jared, despite the fact he lost faith in me.

The gate to her garden is still locked. Darcy must have climbed over it, too. Looking at it now, I can’t believe I made it over. Max takes a bunch of keys from his pocket, slots one into the keyhole and unlocks the gate. Darcy walks in first. This is my last chance to try to escape before I’m taken back inside, but Darcy’s threat has chilled my bones and turned my knees to jelly. I’m too scared. I’m no runner. I know they would catch me. Should I at least try?

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Max says softly. ‘You heard her. She’ll make you suffer for it.’

His words do the trick. I step through the opening and onto the icy grass, with Max keeping hold of my elbow. Darcy is already striding back towards the house, knowing we’ll be following close behind. She slides open the bifold doors. Seems I could’ve escaped out that way – too late now. It seems like days since I was in her kitchen, but it can’t have been more than half an hour ago.

‘Let’s go,’ Darcy says, heading to a door just off the kitchen. Max and I follow her into a long, narrow utility room. At the end, she opens another door and presses a light switch illuminating a flight of stairs which leads down into a basement.

I stop at the top, watching Darcy disappear down the narrow steps. Max prods me in the back and I’m forced downwards, our footsteps loud on the wooden treads. At the bottom lies a vast white cube of a room. I glance around the immaculate space. It’s clean down here, but there’s still a musty smell of damp. Of decay.

At one end runs a floor-to-ceiling wine rack stuffed full of bottles. Next to the rack is a wooden table and six dining chairs. At the opposite end of the room, running along the top of the wall a thin strip of window is the only view of the outside world – a partial view of the floodlit driveway. Darcy presses another switch on the wall and, with a faint whirring sound, a Venetian blind drops down from the ceiling to cover the glass.

She nods to her brother, and he manoeuvres me forward while she sets out one of the heavy wooden dining chairs beneath the strip of window. I land heavily on my backside, banging my coccyx, my pulse racing, fingers burning as the circulation returns to my hands. Max pulls my arms behind the back of the chair and ties them with something that digs into my skin. When he’s done, he comes around the front and takes a couple of black zip ties from his pocket. He crouches down and secures one of my ankles to the chair leg, and does the same with the other, the plastic biting through my jeans.

‘What are you going to do?’ I stare across at Darcy who now sits, legs crossed, on another of the dining chairs. My voice quavers, betraying my fear. If only I were stronger, braver. Max straightens up and stands by my side.

‘Let’s not worry about that right now,’ Darcy replies.

‘No, really,’ I say, my tone sharpening. ‘Let’s worry about it right now. You can’t keep me down here, tied up forever.’

‘You’re right about that,’ she says.

I swallow.

‘Go and move her car,’ Darcy says to Max. ‘Put it out of sight in one of the garages for now.’

‘Are the keys—’

‘How should I know,’ Darcy snaps. She turns to me. ‘Car keys?’

With dismay, I remember my keys are on the hall table next to my bag and phone. I’m well and truly fucked.

‘Don’t make me hurt you,’ she says.

‘On the hall table,’ I mutter.

Max nods and leaves.

‘What’s going on, Darcy?’ I ask. ‘Why do you want to destroy my life? Did you kill Mike? Did you set me up?’ I hear a car engine outside and my heart lifts only to sink again as I realise it’s probably just Max moving my Golf out of sight.

She stands and walks over to me. Instinctively I cringe back in my chair, my gaze flitting from her unsmiling face to the knife in her hand.

‘If you hadn’t come along, they’d have picked me,’ she says bitterly.

‘What are you talking about? What do you mean?’

‘I mean…’ She leans in close to me, her eyes flashing, glinting. ‘You stole the life I was meant to have. Because of you, I lost my chance.’

I have absolutely no idea what she’s on about. I need to know what it is she thinks I’ve done. Maybe she’s confusing me with someone else. Maybe I can talk her round. ‘Darcy, if I’ve done anything to upset you, I’m sorry. But doing this… keeping me here, a prisoner in your house isn’t going to solve anything. It will only make things worse. Can’t we talk about whatever it is that’s troubling you?’ I’m trying to sound sincere. To get her to be reasonable.

The front door slams and heavy footsteps cross the hallway above us. Seconds later, he reappears down the stairs. Damn. Max is back. I was hoping Darcy and I could have had the chance to talk alone for a moment longer.

‘You see,’ she says, ignoring Max who is now back by my side. ‘You don’t even know what you’ve done! That’s how little my life has affected you. But I’ve been cursed by you my whole life.’

‘So tell me!’ I cry. ‘Tell me what I’m supposed to have done.’

Max stands by my shoulder and Darcy sits back down on her chair, running her forefinger along the blade of the knife which lies on the table next to her. I try not to imagine it sticking out of my body.

‘Do you remember your brief stay in Ashlands Residential Care Home, back when you were a kid?’ she asks.

Her question wrong-foots me, setting my heart racing again. Why is she asking me about that? I do remember it. I was ten years old, and it was one of the most unsettling times of my life. I’ve tried to fold it away and keep it locked in my mind. It was such a brief period, and nothing really bad happened. The staff were nice enough. I remember them as kind and welcoming, motherly even. But I had just been removed from my family home, from my birth parents – a mother who was mentally unstable, and a father with anger issues. My whole stay at the care home was surreal, like it wasn’t even happening to me.

‘How do you know about that?’ I ask. ‘And what’s it got to do with you? With what’s happening now.’

‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘from the age of eleven, I was fostered by six different families. Six. None of them loved me. None of them wanted me, and I hadn’t wanted to go with any of them because they hadn’t been the right ones.’ Darcy has stopped looking at me. She’s staring ahead at the white wall, but I can tell she’s seeing somewhere else. A different time and place.

‘So,’ I say, ‘we have something in common. We were both in the care system.’

‘Pftt,’ she says, snapping her head around to face me. ‘You were in care for all of two minutes. I got to spend most of my childhood there. You don’t know what that’s really like.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I really am sorry you had a crappy childhood. But so did I. Until I was adopted, my life was like walking on a tightrope over hot coals.’

‘Oh, poor you,’ she mocks. ‘But this isn’t about whose childhood was the worst. This is about you. And how you stole my childhood from me. How you stole my family.’

‘What?’ I have no idea what she means. For a start, she’s American… How could I have stolen her family?

‘Back then, at Ashlands,’ she says, ‘do you remember the girl in the room next to you?’

‘I don’t really remember much. Like you said, I wasn’t there long. Not more than a couple of weeks.’

‘Yes,’ Darcy says. ‘You were there for twelve whole days before you were adopted. Twelve days, whoopee doo. I was in and out of Ashlands for years.’

‘You were there?’ I gasp. ‘At Ashlands? At the same time as me? Why didn’t you say something before? Did I do something to upset you back then? Is that what this is about? I can’t remember anyone from America being there.’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, don’t you get it? I’m not really American. My name’s Nicole Woodward and I’m from Bristol, okay.’

I’m sure my jaw has never dropped this low before. ‘Your name isn’t Darcy? You’re not from America?’

‘That’s what I just said, isn’t it? Keep up. And that’s my brother, Callum. He was there for a while, too, until he got fostered long-term… without me.’ She glares across at him and he flinches.

I’m still reeling from her revelation, trying to process the fact that she’s not who I thought she was. That we met when we were kids – even if I don’t have any memory of her from back then. ‘That still doesn’t explain why you have me here now,’ I say. ‘Why you’ve gone out of your way to destroy my life.’

‘Cal and I had been at Ashlands for a few months,’ she says, still talking in her fake American accent, ‘and there was a family that came to visit. This really nice couple with a daughter. They talked to me and Cal for ages. They were interested in us. Really interested. I was actually excited for the first time in my life. They should have been the ones. They should have been our new family. Then they left and I never saw them again. And I found out later that they’d adopted you – Miss Perfect. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I saw you cosying up to all the staff with your big innocent eyes, making out that you were some helpless orphan-Annie, like you were so much better than the rest of us. If you hadn’t come along, I would be living your life. They would’ve been my family. Mine and Cal’s.’ Her face is white and strained, her fists clenched against her thighs.

She actually blames me for this. She thinks that as a ten-year-old child I wilfully stole the parents she designated for herself. I mean, yes, I can see how at that age, you would be devastated, but now as an adult surely she can see it was nobody’s fault? Maybe the care home should have taken some of the blame for raising her hopes, but no one else is to blame. Certainly not me.

‘So,’ she continues, ‘I made it my life’s mission to take it all back. To get back the family that should have been mine all along.’

I shake my head in disbelief. ‘You’re an adult now. An adult with a pretty enviable life. Surely you’re past all that?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘When I set out to do something I always have to finish it. Otherwise, what’s the point of anything?’

I give a shiver at her words, taking a guess at what she means by ‘finish it’. I desperately need to keep her talking, so I can figure out how to get out of here.

‘What does Callum have to say about all this?’ I ask. ‘Does he think the same way as you?’ I look up at her brother. ‘Do you, Callum? Do you think it’s right to punish me for something I had no control over?’

He shifts from one foot to the other, glancing across at his sister, and then back down at me. ‘Nic said you ruined everything for us. She’s my sister. I look out for her. You hurt Nic, I’ll hurt you. She looks out for me, too.’

I realise that Callum isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Nicole must have been using and manipulating him for years.

‘I finally tracked you down to Poole a couple of years ago,’ she continues, shifting her attention back to me. ‘And so I persuaded Mike to leave London and move here. Told him it would be better for Tyler to grow up by the sea, or some such crap. I found out your sister’s kid was in the kindergarten at Cerne Manor. My plan was to get to you through her. Then, imagine my delight when you enrolled Joe at the same school. In the very same class as Tyler. What luck!’

I’m still reeling from what she’s telling me. To have spent the whole of her adult life trying to find me so she could ruin my life is insane.

‘Your life was so perfect,’ I say. ‘Surely you already had everything. You had Mike and Tyler, your beautiful house, your business.’

‘I never loved Mike,’ she says without emotion. ‘He was a means to an end. I needed his money to track you down, to take everything from you.’

‘And Tyler?’ I ask, my skin crawling in revulsion at her revelations. I have to get out of here. Shit, how am I going to get out of here?

‘Tyler is everything to me. He’s the only good thing in my life. I’ve been doing this for him as well as me.’

‘What about his dad? You killed Mike. You killed Tyler’s father. How do you think he’ll feel when he finds out what you did?’

‘He will never find out. Never – do you understand me?’

‘How does ruining my life get you what you want?’ I ask. ‘Sure, it might make you feel good, if that’s how you get off, but apart from that—’

‘It’s simple,’ Darcy says.

I wait for her to elaborate.

‘You stole mine and Callum’s childhood,’ she says. ‘You stole our family, so we’ll take them back. I may not be able to reclaim my childhood, but I will have your parents.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I say, my heart in my throat. But the question is redundant. I know exactly what she’s talking about.