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his quivering daughter to face him.
    Her terror-stricken face shimmers with streams of tears.
    ‘What?’ he asks, horrified. ‘What’s happened? Brooke, speak to me!’
    ‘I can’t,’ she mutters.
    ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ he asks, anger seeping into his voice. ‘Is it about that night?’
    ‘I can’t,’ she repeats.
    ‘Brooke, talk to me.
Please
.’
    She wipes her cheeks and tries to calm her trembling hands. She shakes her head.
    ‘Is it about what happened?’
    ‘Dad… leave it.’
    ‘What did you do that was so awful?’ he pleads, his voice raised. ‘What happened to make you and your mother shut me out – and keep secrets? You have both disintegrated before my very eyes.’
    ‘Dad, please…’
    ‘What the
hell
happened that night, Brooke?
’
Michael yells, gripping his daughter by her shoulders. He shakes her vigorously. ‘Tell me what happened! Tell me what destroyed our family!’
    ‘I can’t! I can’t!’ Brooke wails, before snatching the glove from the floor and running up the stairs. The sounds of her cries follow her until her bedroom door slams shut and silence is thrown onto the house like ice-cold water.
    In the kitchen doorway, Dominic stands motionless. He makes eye contact with his father by the front door. The man is broken. The stare is intense and sombre, until it is severed. Michael picks up the package, shuts the front door and returns to his study.
    Dominic listens to the sound of his father’s retreating footsteps. The milk boils over the edge of the saucepan and hisses down onto the hotplate.

Chapter Ten
    Louise has walked for hours.
    Despite the landscape’s natural beauty, her mind is elsewhere: somewhere dark and afflictive. Even her throbbing ankle takes second place in her thoughts. She has thought of her husband, and how she will never be able to forgive him. She has thought of their financial predicament, but has yet to find a way to escape it that would not leave them penniless. She has thought of that night – the night that robbed her of innocence and turned her into a monster.
    She has walked several miles from the village, and has not seen a single person since the Andrews. Reaching the centre of a field, she looks around her, taking in the sight of the white, rolling hills, and the rabbits prancing over the snow-covered grassland in the distance.
    She closes her eyes, takes in a long, deep breath that inflates her lungs, and releases it in a mighty, unrestrained scream. She screams until she is red in the face, unable to scream any longer, and then breathes in again. She falls to her knees, and bellows out the agony of her husband’s betrayal.
    She howls for the loss of her sister and the agony Denise has caused her.
    She screams out her built-up rage and shame over the night that changed her life forever.
    She screams until her voice is hoarse, and her throat is burning.
    Her screams echo over the surrounding fields and hills, and continue to ring in her ears even after she has stopped.
    She lies down on the snow, sobbing and gasping furiously, her breaths escaping in small clouds.
    ‘How did my life get like this?’ she asks herself, lying on her back on the snow. She weeps until she is exhausted, until every muscle in her body aches, and her eyes are unable to produce any more tears.
    Finally, she gets to her feet and brushes off clinging clumps of snow, sensing a slight release from the weight of the despair that hangs over her. On her traipse back to the village, she promises herself this: she will never cry over her husband again.
    ***
    Louise arrives back in the village as the sun begins to set. Shadows creep through the village like a dark mist.
    She walks wearily up the lane, now very aware of her swollen ankle, and utters a sigh of relief when she reaches the house. As she opens the gate, she looks towards the house and sees a moving shadow at oneof the windows. It freezes, as if staring at her. She can just make out the silhouette