Chapter 5

He assigned her a role: she was to attend to Celeste's needs through the remainder of the pregnancy. Personal assistant. Household manager. Whatever was required.

She said yes.

Over the following weeks, Celeste found a remarkable variety of ways to make the arrangement unpleasant. The soup was too hot, and when Lily moved to take it away, Celeste knocked the bowl deliberately — scalding liquid down Lily's wrist and hand. She was summoned at two in the morning to sit at Celeste's bedside while the woman complained of insomnia, and was not dismissed until six. Once, citing a traditional remedy she'd read about, Celeste requested a blood draw administered at home; the household guard made a small cut in Lily's forearm with a knife and stood over her while a nurse collected what was needed.

Lily bore all of it. She washed the burn with cold water and said nothing about the wrist. She sat through the nights and did not let herself fall asleep. She pressed a bandage to her arm and went about her day.

Damian noticed. She could see it — the slight tension in him when she appeared too composed, too quiet. He had expected something from her. Resistance, perhaps. Breakdown, more likely. She gave him neither.

She was patient. She was very, very patient.

The delivery came on a Thursday morning. Lily stood outside the delivery suite and listened to the nurses' voices, to the particular sounds of a birth in progress, and waited. When the cry came — the thin, furious cry of a newborn announcing itself — she watched through the glass as Damian's face cracked open with something that looked, for a moment, entirely genuine.

She had never seen him cry before.

She stood and watched him cry for thirty seconds. Then she looked at the infant in the nurse's arms, and at Celeste's exhausted, triumphant face, and she felt something crystallise inside her — cold and sharp and very clear.

All right then, she thought. All right.

In the confusion of the delivery suite — nurses moving quickly, Damian distracted, the household staff redirected — Lily took the infant.

She walked out of Blackwood Manor at four in the morning with the baby wrapped tightly against the cold and put him in the back seat of a car she'd arranged three weeks earlier. The driver was someone she trusted. She did not look back at the house.

She drove for two hours. The road that led to the cliffs at Beachy Head was familiar — she had walked it once, early in her marriage, on a weekend Damian had spent the whole time on his phone. She had stood at the top and looked at the sea and thought, inexplicably, this is the edge of everything.

Now she stood there again, with the bundle in her arms, and the sky was beginning to lighten at the horizon.

She looked out at the water. The wind was sharp off the sea. The bundle was warm against her chest.

"It's all right," she said quietly. "We're all right."

They arrived at dawn — Damian's car, then two more, grinding on the gravel path behind her. She heard the doors open and didn't turn around.

"Lily." His voice came from twenty meters back. "Put the child down and step away from the edge."

She turned then. Damian stood with Celeste at his side and four security men fanned out behind them, and he was holding a gun. She had not expected the gun. It didn't change anything, but she noted it.

"You want to know what it feels like," she said. "To have someone you love taken from you. To stand somewhere and know that a life is ending and be completely unable to stop it."

"Lily—"

"He was seven days old." Her voice did not shake. "He was seven days old, and I held him, and they took the blood out of him one vial at a time, and no one would let me near him, and he cried, and then he didn't."

Celeste made a sound. Damian's grip on the gun tightened.

"Now you know," Lily said. "Now you get to stand here and feel it."

She held the bundle out over the edge of the cliff.

"No—" Damian moved, and she saw his hand come up and the gun level and she had known, she had calculated this, she had known exactly what he would do—

The shot was louder than she'd expected. The impact hit her shoulder — she had turned slightly at the last moment and it caught the wrong angle, and the force of it spun her, and the cliff edge was right there, and she went over it.

In the half-second before she fell, she threw the bundle.

Not out. Back. Towards Damian.

She saw it leave her hands. She saw him catch it by reflex, both arms coming up, the gun clattering to the ground. She saw his face as the weight of it registered — too light, wrong weight, not a child — and she saw him tear the wrapping open and find the stuffed toy inside.

Then the cliff fell away and there was nothing but wind and the sea below and the cold, cold air.