That strategy worked, but at a price. I had no life of my own. I didn’t really want to get close to anyone in case they started to ask questions, so I kept myself distant. Most of my friends had floated away by then as our children had all grown up, so no one really noticed that I had disappeared into my kitchen. The kids just assumed that was what I preferred. They already had one parent who lit up the sky like a firework. They didn’t need two. It hurt a bit that they didn’t know I had been bubbly and vivacious too once, but sometimes I even doubted that version of myself had ever existed. It all seemed such a very long time ago.

  And then finally, when Nathan turned nineteen, I left. I felt bad about that, of course I did. Nathan had only just gone to uni to do his web design course and I knew it would be unsettling for him, for all of them, but I suddenly felt I had done enough. It was like a switch flicking in my head. One day I could put up with it and the next I had absolutely had enough. It was my time. I had supported them all just like I was supposed to, but now they had lives of their own and it was the right moment for me to reclaim mine.

  I had just had my fiftieth birthday, which Tony and I celebrated with a first-class trip to Venice. I don’t even like Venice that much – it smells and it’s too busy – but it was one of Tony’s favourite places. I made the decision to leave on the plane on the way home, and then it took me a month or so of dithering before I finally took the bull by the horns and packed my bags.

  Tony was devastated. He hadn’t seen it coming at all – why would he have done? – and he couldn’t understand why I seemed to have suddenly made such a huge decision without any build-up of arguments. I didn’t really give him much to go on, to be honest, because I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to lie and deny what I knew was the truth. So I told him I didn’t love him any more, which wasn’t strictly true. I did love him, or at least I loved what I knew was at the core of him; that cheeky young man who had accosted me in the cinema queue and made me laugh.

  What I didn’t love was the person I became when I was in the shade that he cast around him. Sometimes you just have to make a selfish choice, don’t you? This was mine.

  58

  Max was enjoying the party. Apart from the brief skirmish with James and Nathan earlier, it was going well and his hangover from the day before had all but gone.

  He was standing at the bar when he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He pulled it out and peered at the screen. It was a text from Caroline. Confused, he scanned the room for his wife, wondering why she would be texting him when they were in the same place. Then he turned his attention back to his phone.

  I’ve gone. Didn’t feel great. Am ok. See you at home x

  It wasn’t like Caroline to just disappear like that, and certainly not without telling him in person what she was doing. She had been a little bit drunker than usual, he supposed, but this was Ellie’s fortieth birthday. They were always going to be drunk.

  So there must be something else going on, and the obvious thing was the row with James and Nathan. Max urged his memory to play ball. Had Caroline been there when James was shooting his mouth off? Ellie certainly was, he remembered, but how much had Caroline heard? Enough to make her want to go home?

  But she had gone off with Ellie after the row. Ellie would have looked after her, he was sure, so it all would have been smoothed out. He hadn’t checked though, had just left them both to it. Max reprimanded himself. He should have made sure Caroline was all right when the row had blown over. He knew how wobbly she was about the money. Why hadn’t he done that? And now poor Caroline had gone, left her best friend’s birthday party and returned to an empty house on her own.

  Guilt washed over him. He dialled Caroline’s mobile and then the landline, but they both rang resolutely out. She was probably asleep.

  But what if she wasn’t? He was going to have to leave too to make sure that she was okay.

  He abandoned his pint and went off to find Ellie to tell her what was going on. He couldn’t sneak away from his sister’s party like a thief in the night as well.

  Ellie was with a group of women, glass in hand, head tipped back as she laughed at whatever had just been said. Max took her by the arm and gently pulled her away from the group.

  ‘I have to go, Els,’ he said quietly. ‘Caroline has gone home by herself. I think she must have been upset by . . . well . . . I don’t want to leave her on her own. So I’ll go too. It’s been a great party though. Thank you.’

  Ellie looked a little glassy-eyed but she nodded her understanding, her head moving slowly and deliberately as if the action was taking huge concentration.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Tell Caro . . .’ she began but didn’t finish. ‘It’s a great party, isn’t it?’

  Max gave her a quick smile and then left her to it.

  There was a snake of taxis waiting at the nearby rank and he hopped into the front seat of the first one and gave his address. It was a shame they had both left Ellie’s do early, but then again it had been a difficult couple of days, what with the funeral as well. And Ellie seemed to be having a great time, which was the main thing.

  The taxi pulled up outside their house and Max paid the driver and got out. There were lights on inside. Maybe Caroline was still awake. Letting himself in, he called her name but got no reply. He moved through each room in turn looking for her. The sitting room was empty, as was the kitchen, although there was a drained wine bottle on the countertop.

  Max tried upstairs, but when he went into their bedroom the curtains were still open and there was no sign that Caroline had been in there since they’d left for the party hours before. Max’s confusion was starting to turn to panic. Where on earth could she be? What if she had never actually made it home? Visions of her being attacked or snatched flooded through his head.

  He moved towards the window and peered out into the gloom of the garden. There was something on the lawn, a lump that wasn’t usually there. His eyes struggled to make it out in the dark. Was it something the boys had left there, or a full laundry basket? As he peered harder its shape emerged from the darkness. It was a body, not sitting upright but slumped over a box of some sort but he couldn’t make out any more details. Was it Caroline?

  With his heart banging in his chest, he rapped on the glass with his knuckles and called out to her, but the double glazing didn’t let the sound penetrate. Really anxious now, he turned on his heel and raced down the stairs, taking them two at a time, a hundred questions flying through his head as he moved. What was she doing outside slumped over like that? Had she hurt herself? He prayed it was nothing serious.

  The back door was unlocked and he flung it wide in his desperation to get out.

  ‘Caroline! Caroline!’ he shouted, sprinting across the grass towards her. ‘Are you all right?’

  Caroline’s form was completely inert. Max came to a skidding halt next to her, immediately dropping to his knees. He put out a hand and touched her forehead. It was warm and he immediately calmed a little. He hadn’t really thought she was dead, not really, but the memory of finding his dad was still so hauntingly fresh.

  Caroline stirred, moaned a little, then opened her eyes. It took her a moment to focus on his face and then her expression collapsed into one of pure misery.

  ‘Oh, Max,’ she moaned. ‘I’m so glad you’re back. It’s not good. It’s making such a mess of everything. So I’ve got rid of it.’

  She was more drunk than he’d seen her for years, her words all slurred together, their meaning mangled by wine.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said gently. ‘What are you talking about, Caro? What have you got rid of?’

  Caroline looked at him as if he were entirely stupid. ‘The money, of course. I’ve got rid of the money.’

  She was making no sense. It was the middle of the night and there was nowhere she could have paid it into even if she’d wanted to. He started to worry that she might have handed the lot over to a passing tramp in an altruistic but misguided gesture.

  ‘How do you mean?’ he asked, keeping his voice calm and patient. ‘Got rid of it?’

  Caroline tipped her head back and looked up at the dark sky, now dotted with stars. Then she waved her arms about extravagantly.

  ‘Poof!’ she said. ‘Just like that. Poof!! Like magic.’ Then she hiccupped and let out a little giggle.

  Max was doing his best to hold on to his temper now. He would take her inside and give her some coffee and then maybe she might start making a little bit more sense.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, putting his hands under her armpits to haul her to her feet. ‘Let’s get you into the warm.’

  Caroline’s feet scrabbled a little in the damp grass, but then she found purchase and staggered to her feet, and Max got his first chance to see what she had been slumped over.

  It was the suitcase.

  Even though the garden was dark, he could see at once the charred remains of twenty-pound notes. As Caroline stood up, ash was released and blew away into the darkness. Max saw the corner of a note flutter upwards like a black-edged butterfly.

  ‘Oh, my God, Caro,’ he said as he watched. ‘What the hell have you done?’

  Caroline swayed slightly on the spot and pulled a petulant face. ‘I got rid of it,’ she said, her bottom lip sticking out like a child’s. ‘It’s caused nothing but trouble from the moment I found it, so I decided that it would be better for everyone if I just made it disappear.’

  Max felt sick. A quarter of a million pounds gone up in smoke in his back garden. The others would kill him. This would be the end of the family. There would be no coming back from here. Their relationships with James and Nathan were already stretched to breaking point. How would he explain that Caroline had just torched the lot?

  Adrenaline coursed through Max’s body, making him feel very cold all of a sudden. This was a disaster, worse than any of the scenarios they had come up with when they’d been trying to decide what to do with the money. Simply destroying it wasn’t something any of them had even contemplated, for obvious reasons.

  Caroline had started to cry now, but Max was struggling to find sympathy for her.

  ‘But the thing is, Max,’ she began. She wiped at her eyes with dirty hands and left sooty tracks across her cheeks. ‘The thing is, I failed. I couldn’t do it. I can’t even do a simple thing like setting a fire. It just wouldn’t catch light and it kept going out. And then I used up all the matches.’ She kicked despondently at the empty matchbox on the grass.

  Max looked again at the suitcase, dropping to his knees so he could see it close up. She was right. Now that the wind had taken the ashes from the top, he could see that most of the notes were still intact, although a few were a little singed on the edges. He let out a huge breath.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Caroline,’ he snapped. ‘Do you know what you nearly did?’

  ‘I did it for us,’ Caroline replied peevishly. ‘I’m tired of us all falling out. We never fall out, me and Ellie. We’re friends. Best friends. But all this’ – she kicked the suitcase and the bundles of notes shifted – ‘this has made us argue. And I don’t like it, Max. I don’t like anything about it. I want it gone. I want it to all be finished with.’ She aimed another wobbly kick at the suitcase but barely made contact. ‘I want it out of our lives so I don’t have to think about it any more.’

  Then she launched herself at him, throwing her arms around his neck and sobbing into his chest.

  ‘I know,’ he said, feeling tender towards her again now he knew she hadn’t managed to destroy all their futures. ‘Let’s go inside and tomorrow we can have a proper talk about what we need to do. I think the time has come, Caro, when we need to reconsider our position on all this, for the good of the family if nothing else.’

  As he said this, his wife’s head pressing hard into his chest, Max knew he was right. This couldn’t go on any longer. He had been prepared to stand at Caroline’s shoulder and back her up – that was his duty and the right thing to do, but not indefinitely.

  He still believed she was probably right about the money being dirty. But that in itself wasn’t enough. He had his brother and sister to think about as well. This was not just about Caroline’s integrity and sorting right from wrong. That much was clear from the increasingly desperate reactions of James and Nathan. It was obvious that they both had agendas he knew nothing about. Why else would they be so aggressive?

  But their motivations were none of his business. He didn’t need to know what they wanted their share of the money for. What he couldn’t let happen was for the family to fall apart. His dad was gone and he was the head of the family now. The huge responsibility of that position weighed heavily on him. They had always been so close, the three of them, and he wasn’t going to let anything change that. The Frost family was not about to disintegrate. Not on his watch.

  He would talk to Caroline when she was sober. There must be something they could do, some compromise she would be happy with, even if it meant giving their share to the Cat’s Protection League. All he had to do was work out what that compromise looked like and then make the proposal to her in a way that meant she would see he was right.

  He loosened Caroline’s grip on him a little and bent down to close the case before a gust of wind came and swept more of the money away.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said quietly. ‘And then we can see how this all looks in the morning. It won’t be as bad by then, Caro. I promise.’

  As they stumbled back into the house, Max really hoped that was true.

  59

  Caroline felt terrible. A team of little dwarves seemed to be chipping away at the inside of her skull and the contents of her stomach roiled when she moved. It felt safest to keep her eyes closed, but then the room span so violently that it made her feel worse. It was morning, though. She could tell by the colour of the curtains that it was light outside. Was she still drunk?

  Her body went cold and clammy before the wave of nausea overtook her and she just managed to stumble out of bed and into the en-suite bathroom in time.

  ‘Morning!’ came Max’s mocking voice from the bedroom. ‘Can I get you anything? Water? Paracetamol?’

  ‘How about a new head?’ she said weakly as she curled herself around the toilet pan. ‘And a new body whilst you’re at it. I think I may actually be dead.’

  She heard Max getting out of bed and then he appeared in the en suite, smiling sympathetically.

  ‘You were certainly going for it last night,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you in that kind of state since we were students.’

  ‘God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t spoil the party, did I?’ Caroline suddenly felt panicked. She had no memory of leaving the party or how she got home. She assumed Max must have seen she was too drunk and brought her back, but what if she had disgraced herself at Ellie’s beautiful do first? She threw a worried look at Max, the sudden movement making her head spin, but he was grinning at her.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You didn’t spoil anything. Well, apart from about a grand. You pretty much trashed that.’

  Caroline’s brow wrinkled as she tried to work out what on earth he was talking about. ‘Shit. Did I break a window or something? Tell me, Max. What was it? I have this horrible feeling that I embarrassed myself somehow, but I honestly can’t remember any of it.’

  Feeling a little less fragile now, she stood up gingerly, threw some cold water over her face and stumbled back on to the bed, pulling the duvet over herself.

  ‘Well . . .’ began Max.

  Caroline screwed her face up whilst she waited to hear the worst.

  ‘You left the party on your own,’ he began.

  Caroline was immediately confused. That was so unlike her. She wracked her brain to think why she would have done something so out of character. And then it came to her. The row with James and Nathan. Fragments of what she had overheard floated round her head, not quite solid enough to grasp hold of but still painful. ‘Do-gooding’, ‘over-inflated sense of right and wrong’ ‘majority vote’. She really didn’t need to have the full sentences to get the gist of what they had said. And hadn’t there been something with Ellie too? That felt unlikely, but there was something gnawing at her gut that she couldn’t identify.

  ‘I think I must have been upset by the row with James and Nath.’ She paused, looking at Max for confirmation. ‘There was a row with James and Nath, right?’

  Max nodded.

  ‘So, then I came home on my own. Without saying goodbye. Shit! What will Ellie think of me?’

  ‘Ellie was fine when I spoke to her,’ said Max. ‘I’m sure she understood.’

  Caroline relaxed back into the pillows. That was okay then. The last thing she would ever want to do was upset Ellie, and especially not on her big night. But it seemed she had just got a bit upset and decided the party would be better off without her. That was okay. It could have been worse.

  ‘It was what you did when you got home that’s the interesting part,’ added Max. He raised an eyebrow and Caroline suddenly felt like a child being told off by a parent.

  But there was nothing in her memory bank for that part of the evening. It had been completely wiped. The last thing she thought she remembered was sending Max a text, although she couldn’t quite piece together where she had been when she did that.

  ‘What did I do?’ she asked in a small voice.

  Max came and sat down on the bed next to her. The movement made her stomach turn over, but she kept control. He was half-smiling at her, so whatever she had done couldn’t have been that bad, surely.

  ‘If I said the words “garden”, “suitcase”, “matchbox” to you, would that help?’ he asked.

  She tried to think of any possible situation in which those words could be put together but came up with zero.