Maybe threatening Perry that she’d leave him was because she wanted to confess what she’d done; she couldn’t bear the burden of her secret.

Of course, it was also because the thought of Perry, or anyone, signing that petition filled her with rage, but especially Perry. He owed a debt to Jane. A family debt because of what his cousin had done. (May have done, she kept reminding herself. They didn’t know for sure. What if Jane had misheard the name? It could have been Stephen Banks, not Saxon Banks at all.)

Ziggy might be Perry’s cousin’s child. He owed him at least his loyalty.

Jane was Celeste’s friend, and even if she weren’t, no five-year-old deserved to have a community begin a witch hunt against him.

Perry didn’t take the car into the garage, pulling up outside the house in the driveway. Celeste assumed that meant he wasn’t coming in.

“I’ll see you tonight,” she said, leaning over to kiss him.

“Actually, I need to come in to get something from my desk,” said Perry. He opened the car door.

She felt it then. It was like a smell or a change in the electrical charge in the air. It was something to do with the set of his shoulders, the blank, shiny look in his eyes and the dryness in her throat.

He opened the door for her and let her in first, with a courtly gesture.

“Perry,” she said quickly, as she turned around and he closed the door, but then he grabbed her by the hair, twisting it behind her and pulling so hard, so astonishingly hard, that pain radiated through her scalp and her eyes filled with instant, involuntary tears.

“If you ever, ever embarrass me like that again, I will kill you, I will f**king kill you.” He tightened his grip. “How dare you. How dare you.”

He let go.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

But she mustn’t have said it right, because he stepped forward slowly and took her face in his hands the way he did when he was about to tenderly kiss her.

“Not good enough,” he said, and he slammed her head against the wall.

The cold deliberateness of it was as shocking and surreal as the first time he’d hit her. The pain felt intensely personal, like a broken heart.

The world swam as though she were drunk.

She slid to the floor.

She retched once, twice, but she wasn’t sick. She only ever retched. She was never sick.

She heard his footsteps walking away, down the hallway, and she curled up on the floor, her knees near her chest, her hands interlaced over the back of her cruelly throbbing head. She thought of the boys when they hurt themselves, the way they sobbed: It hurts, Mummy, it hurts so much.

“Sit up,” said Perry. “Honey. Sit up.”

He crouched down next to her, pulled her up into a sitting position and gently laid an ice pack wrapped in a tea towel on the back of her head.

As the blessed coldness began to seep through, she turned her head and studied his face through blurry eyes. It was dead white, with purplish crescents under his eyes. His features were dragged downward, as though he were being ravaged by some terrible disease. He sobbed once. A grotesque, despairing sound, like an animal caught in a trap.

She let herself fall forward against his shoulder, and they rocked together on their glossy black walnut floor beneath their soaring cathedral ceiling.

55.

Madeline had often said that living and working in Pirriwee was like living in a country village. Mostly she adored that sense of community—except, of course, on those days when PMS had her in its malicious grip, and she longed to walk through the shopping village without people smiling and waving and being so goddamned nice. Everyone was connected to everyone in Pirriwee, often in multiple ways, through the school or the surf club, the kids’ sporting teams, the gym, the hairdresser and so on.

It meant that when she sat at her desk in her tiny, crammed office in the Pirriwee Theatre and made a quick call to the Pirriwee local paper to see if she could get a last-minute quarter-page ad in next week’s paper (they urgently needed more numbers for the preschoolers’ drama class to help bring in some cash), she wasn’t just calling Lorraine, the advertising representative. She was calling Lorraine, who had a daughter, Petra, in the same year as Abigail, and a son in Year 4 at Pirriwee Public, and was married to Alec, who owned the local bottle shop and played in an over-forty soccer club with Ed.

It wouldn’t be a quick call, because she and Lorraine hadn’t talked for a while. She realized this as the phone was ringing, and nearly hung up and sent an e-mail instead—she had a lot to do today and she was already running late from going to the assembly—but still, just a quick chat with Lorraine would be nice, and she did want to hear what Lorraine had heard about the petition and so on, but then again, Lorraine did go on sometimes, and—

“Lorraine Edgely!”

Too late. “Hi, Lorraine,” said Madeline. “It’s Madeline.”

“Darling!” Lorraine should really work for the theater, not the local paper. She had that flamboyant theater-talk down pat.

“How are you?”

“Oh my God, we should have coffee! We must have coffee! There’s so much to talk about,” said Lorraine. She lowered her voice so much, it became muffled. Lorraine worked in a busy open-plan office. “I have gossip hot off the press. I have sizzling-hot gossip.”

“Give it to me now,” said Madeline happily, settling back and resting her feet. “Right this minute.”