The Broken Ones (18 page)

ADELINE

It’s easy to stay at the B&B without raising any suspicions. I pay for a month up front and tell the friendly woman who runs the place that I’m keeping a low profile after leaving an abusive husband. She taps her nose and replies, “Say no more.” So I don’t.

I learn Sophie’s routine. She waits until the blonde nurse, Erin, gets to the house every weekday morning, and then she drives to Eddington Primary School. She leaves between 4 and 5pm every day and comes home. Erin leaves around ten minutes later. Maureen barely leaves the house.

There has to be a reason why Maureen needs constant care. I keep watching. Sometimes on the weekend Maureen and Sophie go shopping together, or go to a café.

I have to be very careful when I follow them. At one point I switch rental cars to a blue Nissan to stop any nosy neighbours from getting suspicious. The street is fairly quiet, but it’s also close to a park that seems popular with parents who like to drive everywhere. That means the neighbours are accustomed to seeing strange cars on the street. But when Sophie and Maureen leave the house, I have my hair tied back and tucked under a hat. The weather is hot and sunny, which makes the hat uncomfortable, but at least my sunglasses don’t stick out like a sore thumb.

After Sophie has left for work, I sneak around to the back of the house and watch as Maureen comes out to the garden. I watch as she settles into a deck chair with a cup of tea. After taking a sip, she throws the tea to the ground, breaking the mug on the patio stones.

Erin comes rushing out into the garden. “Oh, what did you do that for?” she says with a sigh.

“It was too hot.”

“I did say to let it cool.”

After Erin is done cleaning up the mess, Maureen says, “Where’s my cup of tea? I asked for one hours ago.”

“Give me two minutes, Maureen.”

“Who are you, and where’s Sophie?” Maureen snaps.

“I’m Erin. I’m your nurse. I’ve been taking care of you for a couple of months now. Do you remember?”

Maureen narrows her eyes as though she’s trying to remember. “Yes. Yes, I think I do.”

“I’ll bring you that cup of tea.”

As Erin walks away, I watch Maureen playing with a set of keys. She dangles them through her fingers and drops them onto the patio stones. Of course… the woman has dementia. That’s why she needs a nurse.

Slowly, I pull the hat from my head and fluff out my hair. My heart is thumping against my ribs. I only have a few minutes while Erin is busy making the tea in the kitchen. I glance up at the kitchen. Erin has her back to the window.

Am I going to do this? I’ve done some risky things in my time, but this?

I open the gate into the garden and walk slowly up to Maureen.

“You dropped these, Mum. Maybe I should hold on to them for safekeeping.”

A thrill passes through me as Maureen’s eyes meet mine. “Yes, all right.”

“I have to get back to work.”

When she reaches out and grabs my hand, an electric shock jolts up my arm. I try hard to suppress the urge to rip my hand away from her.

“Wait. Are you—?”

“I’m Sophie, Mum.”

She lets me go. Her eyes are unfocussed and confused.

I hurry back to the end of the garden, my breath ragged and my forehead clammy. My fingers shake when I open and close the gate. I retrieve the hat from where I hid it and run to my car. I drive away, and I contemplate never coming back.

*

My room at the B&B smells like vomit.

I haven’t done that since I paid that guy to drive into my father’s Mercedes. It’s true that I felt numb when my parents died, but when I hired the hit man, I reacted more strongly than I’d ever thought I would.

I hold the keys until the metal warms. Now I can get into their house. After I’ve purged myself of the loathing hiding in my belly, a new kind of excitement tickles my empty stomach. I took some of the control from Maureen. They can never get that back.

But I need to be careful. Sophie will hunt for these keys when she realises Maureen has lost them. She might even change the locks. Tomorrow, I’ll get replicas made of every key, and then I’ll toss the keys back into the garden. Maureen will barely even realise they’ve been gone. And if she tells Sophie about seeing me—or rather,
her
—Sophie will put it down to her dementia. She’ll never believe her.

*

When I was fifteen, I broke into an old movie director’s house in the Hamptons with my friend Jake. We wanted to have sex in his pool. We climbed over the wall, and I fell heavily on the ground and hurt my ankle. Before I knew it, there were lights everywhere and a huge guy jumped on top of me while I wriggled and giggled, high on whatever drugs we’d found lying around Jake’s parents’ house.

It was my one and only attempt at breaking and entering. Until now.

The Howland house is silent. I slip in through the garden gate and around the path to the front of the house. I didn’t want to walk up to the front door in case any of the neighbours happened to be staring out of their window in the middle of the night, but the sliding doors to the garden will make too much noise.

I know from watching the house that there isn’t an alarm. There’s no dog. I have the key. I just need to be silent.

I’m wearing all black, including a black balaclava. I’m a real criminal now.

I slide the key into the lock and twist it slowly. The sound of the door opening is quieter than my hammering heart. I don’t quite close the door, because I know I’ll need to escape fast if anyone wakes up.

My shoes are silent against the carpet. When my eyes have adjusted to the gloom, I scan the living room of the house I might have grown up in. What if Maureen hadn’t sold me and had gotten the money to move to Eddington some other way? This is the sofa I would have sat on to watch Molly Ringwald movies with my sister. That’s the kitchen I would have made grilled cheese in, or whatever they call it here. Maybe beans on toast, then.

Maybe I would have been able to convince Mum to get us a dog. We could have played with him in the garden when we weren’t arguing about boys.

There’s no other option than to shut down my thoughts. I have jobs to do. The most important is logging on to Sophie’s computer. I want to know everything I can about the two of them. But first, I have to install software to allow me to control her laptop from my own, which will be impossible if her laptop is password protected.

I open the machine on the kitchen table and suppress the urge to let out a sigh of relief when it opens onto her desktop automatically. I quickly insert a USB stick and install the remote desktop software. There’s an agonising minute or two when I can do nothing but wait. Then I put the laptop back in position and slip the USB stick back into my pocket.

At the bottom of the stairs, I imagine the two of them sleeping softly, with no idea that I’m in their house. Before I know it, my feet are moving up the stairs. A slight creak from the floorboards forces me to stop. Without breathing, I listen to the house. I hear it settle, but there’s no indication that either Sophie or Maureen has woken. I take the last few steps slowly.

I have no idea who sleeps in which room. It’s by pure chance that I gently open the door closest to the stairs to find the woman who gave birth to me sleeping quietly on her side with her mouth slightly agape. There she is, the woman who held a baby girl in her arms and then five years later sold that child to corrupt men for them to do with her whatever they wanted. I could have been sold to a paedophile ring or worked as a sex slave for the rest of my life. I could have been murdered for pleasure and left in an unmarked grave. Would I have found more peace in that unmarked grave than in the life I have now?

This woman robbed me of so many things, and there isn’t enough money in Daddy’s trust fund to make up for that. I reach towards her, stopping an inch from her face. A few minutes and I could take her last breath.

Her eyes open.

I retract my hand. I pull the ski mask from my face so she can see me.

“Sophie?” she says.

“You know what you should do?” I say. “You should drink bleach. An entire bottle. You should take all your pills at once. It would make you better.”

“Okay,” she mumbles.

I turn away and hurry out of the house, away from the family who abandoned me.

ADELINE

A few days ago, I saw Sophie meet a man for coffee. It was exhilarating for me, because it was the first time I had seen Sophie with someone who wasn’t her mother or one of the teachers at school. Now able to access her laptop from my own in the B&B bedroom, I discovered that this man’s name was Peter and that he had been messaging her on her dating profile. Things seemed pretty serious, judging from his messages, though Sophie clearly wasn’t as interested as he was.

I broke into the Howland house a few times after the first try. It was too easy—and it was addictive. Sophie, clearly a heavy sleeper, never woke while I crept up the stairs and whispered to our mother in the darkness.

“I know you,” she said to me once.

“You will know me,” I replied.

Every morning, when I watch Sophie go to work, she appears even more exhausted than before. She’s had to take our mother to the hospital after Maureen drank the bleach, an event that made me excited and sick at the same time. She had to call the police and change the locks. That was disappointing. If I try to steal Maureen’s keys again, it might be noticed. My days of letting myself into the house at night are over. Especially after Sophie installs CCTV cameras.

But then she does something even better. She’s installed hidden cameras in her own home that she can access on her computer. Which means I can access them too.

I see everything. I see their daily lives. Every dull evening spent on the sofa in front of the TV. Every time Maureen throws a tantrum at her nurse. Every time Sophie pours herself a glass of wine and puts her head in her hands at the end of the day. I see it all.

So I mess with them. I ruin Sophie’s relationship with the nurse. Why should she get to have best friends? I sleep with her boyfriend. He doesn’t even realise it isn’t her. He’s fat and unattractive, but I’m so turned on by the thought of being
her
that I don’t care. I find a bag of clothes meant for charity sitting on the front step. After stealing one or two items, I cut the rest into ribbons.

I know where every camera is, inside and outside the house. I can turn some of them off via the software I installed on Sophie’s laptop. I do it just to freak her out. The thought of messing with her head, making her paranoid, becomes so exhilarating and addictive that I can’t stop.

Whatever they do, I’m watching. When they get undressed at night, I’m watching. In those lonely moments of devastation, when nothing but alcohol-driven tears will do, I’m watching. They can’t escape me. I’m back, despite their best efforts to forget me, and I’ll make sure that they
know
me, once and for all.

During this time of prying into their intimate moments, what I find the most interesting are Sophie’s emails to her ex-boyfriend, Jamie. It gives me an insight into a facet of Sophie and Maureen’s relationship that I didn’t know existed. It seems that Maureen didn’t just rob me of the childhood I deserved, she withheld that childhood from my sister. I can see it through every word in those emails. I see the complete and utter destruction of self-confidence in my sister. I see the toxic relationship that exists between her and our mother, and the way it breaks her relationship with Jamie.

I go through all of her emails, creating screen shots and printing them out. I pin them to my hotel wall, highlighting important sections:

I can’t do this anymore, Soph. I can’t watch her pick you apart bit by bit. I can’t have children with you because I don’t want
her
as their grandmother.

You need to stand up to her or you’ll never be free.

Put her in a home, Sophie. Sell the house. Move in with me and be happy.

It’s so urgent and desperate. As a child, I watched Mom and Dad drunkenly tear chunks from one another. I saw them bruised black and blue from each other’s rage, but I never saw anything so sad as this long, tiresomely polite deconstruction of frustration. It almost breaks my heart.

Almost.

But Sophie was given a choice. She could have left our mother long ago and lived a life of freedom. I’m still the one who was sold, and she’s still the sister who stole my identity, leaving me with nothing.

It’s not long after I’ve paid for my second month at the B&B that I decide that the time has come. The games are about to stop. I need to speak to my sister. I need to stop
being
her and
face
her.