The Perfect Family Read online

  The PERFECT FAMILY

  SAMANTHA KING

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  PART TWO

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  PART THREE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  PART FOUR

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Samantha King

  First published in 2017 in Great Britain by Piatkus, an imprint of Little,

  Brown Book Group, as THE CHOICE.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1536-4

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-1536-5

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1535-7

  For Paul, Hani and Rafi—you are my world.

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

  PROLOGUE

  My daughter’s curls are red-gold. They glint in the morning sunshine as the fine silken tendrils dance away from my searching hands, and I stand transfixed as I watch them drift upwards in a fiery cloud. I wasn’t reaching for her hair—I was aiming for her body as it flew backwards, a slow-motion tableau implanting itself in my brain—but my arms flail uselessly, hugging only dry summer air to my chest as I try to stop her from falling and instead catch just the floating wisps of her coppery ringlets, the ones she’s been pestering me to trim so that she can straighten them and look less cute, more grown-up.

  She will never look more grown-up; she will never grow up.

  The thought jolts deep inside me, echoing the thud of her body hitting the ground. I drop to the garden path, ignoring the bone-crunching impact of concrete against my kneecaps as I crawl, clawing my way towards her beneath the rose bushes. My shaking fingers scrabble through stony soil, skin tearing as I reach frantically ahead of me, nausea burning my throat at the sickly smell of blood on my hands and wrists. So much blood. My shoulders almost dislocate as I overstretch my arms, plunging my hands into the halo of Annabel’s hair, twining the soft coils around my fingertips as if that will tie her to me. I rest my cheek against the clammy soil and hope to die too.

  No release comes; instead, my mind is stuck in a loop of horror and memory . . .

  * * *

  Annabel is small for her age. Her frame is slight, her legs surprisingly long for a girl barely four feet tall, and her arms are skinny. My chopsticks, she always calls them. Her hair is the biggest thing about her—a fine, sugar-spun gossamer crown of untameable auburn curls. I’ve always thought Annabel’s personality grew to complement her hair: ethereal, restless, impossible to behold without smiling in delight.

  Aidan’s would be the same, if Dom hadn’t made me get it cut short nine months ago. I’d felt like a criminal taking him to the barber on the high street, the Saturday before their first day at the new school. I remember the tears he’d tried to hide behind his encyclopedia, and then later my tears as Annabel impatiently waved me away at the school gate, pulling her younger-by-two-minutes brother behind her across the lush lawn towards the grand red-brick building. I looked around at the smart purple blazers and my heart squeezed for Aidan as he self-consciously reached up to rub his shorn hair.

  Dom had been right to complain: the barber had gone too far and I should have stopped him, but I’d hesitated too long when he insisted that all the boys were wearing it that short. I consoled myself that it might help Aidan fit in rather than stand out. The poorest kids at the posh school: I couldn’t bear to think of the gibes they might suffer, no matter how small the class sizes and how amazing the facilities. Dom had been wrong about the school, though: the twins were far happier at their old state primary, with their old friends, kids who didn’t expect iPhones and private ski lessons in their party bags. But I’d lost that particular argument, as I’ve lost most arguments over this last year, especially when it comes to the twins.

  Aren’t they so terribly alike? the gym-kitted nannies always gushed, before racing off to their Pilates classes.

  Well, yes, except that they’re not. My son always clung to me, wanting to hold my hand as long as possible, but my daughter was forever shrugging me off, longing to fly high, soaring towards freedom.

  Was that why you chose him? Because he needed you—loved you—more?

  My children both needed me! They both loved me. And I loved them equally.

  The gritty soil grinds deeper into my cheek as the argument in my head spins endlessly, pointlessly: Annabel will never need me again, and Aidan won’t admit it even if he does. That is my punishment for allowing a killer to enter my home, for shielding my shy, sweet, overcautious son and allowing my vivacious, spotlight-seeking daughter, who always faced life so fearlessly, to race headlong to her death.

  “I’ll get it, Mum. You carry on; you’re doing a great job.” Aidan ambled towards the front door at the sound of the buzzer, but I raised a hand to stop him.

  “Hang on a minute, love. You know I don’t like you answering the door to strangers.”

  “Who says it’s a stranger?” Annabel said, leaping up from the sofa. “It might be Uncle Max. He said he had an extra-special surprise for us.”

  “Huh.” I rolled my eyes. “Just give me one more sec.”

  There. Perfect. Unaware of tragedy lurking round the corner, a malicious spy watching our safe, ordinary family, I actually smiled as I inserted the last of the candles into the blue icing on top of their huge, swimming-pool-shaped birthday cake—ten purple ones for Annabel, ten red ones for Aidan. It would make a stunning centerpiece for their pool party that afternoon.

  “I’ll be right there!” I called out, licking a smudge of icing from my fingers and hurrying to the door.

  But Annabel got there first. “It’s the postman, bet you—look at that gi
ant shadow through the glass. He must have the most humongous stack of presents!”

  “Hope one of them is a new Xbox,” added my gaming-obsessed son, moving to stand at his sister’s shoulder.

  “You know your dad’s not keen on video games,” I said, doing my best not to sound snippy.

  “That’s because he always wants to win and hates getting shot,” Aidan said sagely, his eye-roll so like mine, and I laughed again.

  It was uncanny, though, because the next few seconds felt exactly like we’d stepped into one of Aidan’s trigger-blasting games. I watched my daughter, two steps ahead of me, pull open the front door and look up at the giant shadow wearing army fatigues and a balaclava but bearing no gifts, blotting out the perfect summer morning, looming larger still as he grabbed hold of both children and dragged them down the side of the house into the back garden, gloved hand pointing a gun at each of their almost-identical, birthday-shiny faces and then at my stricken one as I caught up with them.

  “Choose one, bitch.”

  Now there is darkness.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Three months later

  My son’s hair needs cutting. It hangs over his eyes and he peeps through it like a nervous actor scanning the audience through a chink in the curtains before daring to make an appearance on stage. It’s only me he’s hiding from, though. He turns his head when I walk into the room, twists his slim body away from me when I go to cuddle him. My fingertips tingle with longing for the almost forgotten feel of Aidan’s milky-soft cheeks, and I wrap my arms around myself to stop them aching with the heavy emptiness of having no child to hug.

  For thirty-six weeks I carried the twins inside me, our heartbeats a triple echo of each other’s, first from the inside and then against my chest as I nurtured their tiny bodies, physically and emotionally, skin against skin. An invisible knot of mutual need and love bound us together; we were as one, and for the first ten years of their lives the knot tightened. Now it has been ripped apart, and my beautiful girl is gone.

  Missing her somehow keeps Annabel’s presence alive, and I cling desperately to that. I abandoned my daughter in that one dreadful moment; I will never let her go for all the moments hereafter. But the pain of loss is paralyzing—for me, for my husband Dom, and for my son who doesn’t know how to be in this world without his twin.

  Pressed into one corner of the sofa, eyes fixed on the Nintendo DS in his hands, Aidan looks like he wants to disappear into his surroundings. I notice he’s wearing the jeans and shirt again, the ones I bought him to wear to their tenth birthday party, and I wonder how he can bear to—how the very fabric of them doesn’t hurt his skin with painful reminders. Or maybe that’s the point: wear the same clothes, remind Mum of what she did. It’s working, and I know I deserve it, yet it feels . . . unexpected.

  I’m not quite sure what I did expect; just not this . . . this void of silent recrimination. Aidan has never been a cruel boy; he’s gentle and caring. I remember holding him for hours when our pet cat Disco was run over, stroking his hair, his three-year-old body shuddering beneath my hands, while Annabel patted his hand curiously, looking uncertainly at me with questions she didn’t know how to ask. Eventually, his tears stopped and he cuddled her and she smiled again.

  Aidan was the only one of us who could make Annabel smile when she didn’t get picked for the lead role after a dance audition, or when she had to miss a swimming meet because of a cold. He adored her as much as he now clearly hates me. No, hate is too strong, too active. I simply don’t exist for him any more, and he is barely existing. He was always Annabel’s shadow, but now he’s a shadow of himself, adrift without the twin who curled against him in the womb, wrapped herself around him as a baby and held on tight to him for the rest of her too-short life.

  My precious, extraordinary twins.

  They were always inseparable and I see Annabel’s face every time I look at Aidan’s. I would speak to him—I long to—but the words won’t come, and I know he won’t answer, anyway. Aidan, I’m so sorry, my love. The apology—so inadequate—fills my mind and vibrates through every nerve ending. It seems like the only thing I ever say these days, and I only say it in my head; the words never actually pass my lips.

  I don’t need a doctor to tell me that post-traumatic shock has stolen my voice. Selective mutism—the term floats towards me from university psychology lectures, oh, so many years ago. I know this explains my silence, and I understand that trauma has created an anxiety disorder that is suppressing my memory—along with my appetite, physical sensations, energy levels . . .

  I know all this but I’m powerless to change it. Every day I feel like I’m walking through clouds; everything is hazy, deadened. Everything except my emotions; they have never felt so raw. I keep mentally listing them on the imaginary whiteboard in my head—anything to keep some kind of grip on reality, to retain some sense of myself. I already feel like I’ve half vanished.

  * * *

  That whiteboard. It’s in my mind most days now, with all kinds of notes, diagrams and commentary jotted across its gleaming surface. My own personal textbook. My eyes feel strained, myopic, but I have no trouble at all picturing my old uni whiteboard, complete with handsome failed-actor-turned-lecturer Seamus Jackson striking a pose in front of it. I suppose it’s to be expected; I spent enough hours staring at them both.

  Seamus Jackson. I haven’t thought of him in years, but now his dulcet Scottish tones have become the voice in my head. In today’s imaginary lecture, my memory has dredged up the image of Seamus-call-me-Shay-guys in his usual spread-legged stance, theatrically squiggling a drawing of a brain after severe trauma—scattered neurotransmitters, the lot. Hands on hips, Shay carves a dramatic tale from a dry explanation of how, after trauma, an overstimulated amygdala can become “jammed in fight-or-flight mode, guys, often completely freezing a person’s capacity for speech.” A dramatic pause, then he continues: “Excessive anxiety, or trauma, can crank up the amygdala’s sense of danger to such a heightened extent that it effectively, like, short-circuits, creating an ever-present sense of danger that, put bluntly, causes the sufferer simply to clam up!”

  Yes, I understand my silence, but I hate it. I hate that I can recall lectures I attended when I was barely out of my teens, but I cannot remember what happened in my own back garden on the morning of the twins’ tenth birthday, a day that changed all our lives completely and for ever. I remember Shay’s piercing blue eyes yet the exact details of my daughter’s murder—the last moments of her precious life—are a complete blank. Such is the paradox of the mind; and people always think it’s the heart that’s so complicated.

  I hadn’t even realized I was paying that much attention to Shay. We’d shared just one illicit week together (Dating a student is a lecturer’s self-destruct button), yet I remember every word he taught me. It’s only now that I recall them, though: at the lowest point of my life. I have lost my darling daughter—worse than that, I gave her up—and it is unfathomable to me.

  Choose one, bitch.

  Why would anyone want to force me to make such a choice? It’s like something out of that old Meryl Streep film my flatmate and I used to weep buckets over on rainy Sunday afternoons. Sophie’s Choice—that was it. But this isn’t a movie; this is my life. How dare anyone do this to me—to my daughter?

  Anger. Here it comes again. I’ve learned not to resist it. Instead, I jot it conscientiously on my mental whiteboard, allowing the wisdom of Shay to surface once more: “Rage can grip many a bereaved person, guys. Don’t make the mistake of thinking loss is a passive experience.”

  Instinctively I know my mind is protecting itself by blotting out everything the police must have told me about the gunman; the trauma of losing Annabel has brought down a shutter in my mind, and no matter how many times I try to recall that awful day, those appalling moments, all that emerges is jumbled, fractured memories. But in truth, it isn’t agonizing over who did this or even why that has stolen my voi
ce along with my capacity to sleep, think or even move very far. What keeps me frozen in shock is not his guilt, but mine.

  I try for the thousandth time to make sense of it. Did it mean I love Aidan more because I saved him? Or that I loved Annabel more because I chose her? They were twins; I always vowed to love them equally, to show no favoritism. So what was I thinking? Did I sacrifice Annabel for her brother’s sake? Or did I save her from the torment of existing in this dark place where the three of us drift like shadows, tiptoeing silently around the gaping hole in our lives, together but no longer a family?

  No answer comes; my mind is a closed book.

  Dom has been a glacier of impassive calm, and I know I’ve left it to him to speak to the police, the lawyers, the journalists, the neighbors . . . He’s never blamed me—and he’s never, in my hearing at least, told Aidan that I’m to blame. I know he won’t turn our son against me; he won’t force him to choose between his parents in the way that I was forced to choose between my children. We disagreed passionately about the twins’ school, but those arguments are long forgotten.

  Life simply drifts on—the same, yet totally changed. We live in the same comfortable home, on the same quiet street in Hampton village; the usual domestic routine ebbs and flows: school, clubs, homework, playdates with Aidan’s friend Jasper. But I don’t leave the house any more. I spend my time now watching my son and my husband prowl restlessly through each room, unable to settle. They stare right through me, pretending they’re busy just getting on with everyday things, while I glide like a ghost on the periphery of their lives. I can’t speak, I barely sleep, and I don’t know how to look forward; all I seem able to do is look back and wonder: How did I get here? Why did this terrible thing happen?