They’ve been in their home for six months. They would’ve moved in sooner if it had been up to Christopher, but Ada wanted to live alone for a while and find her feet in her new career as an interior designer. Their house isn’t huge or grand, but it is filled with love and warmth, and every room is expertly decorated by my talented sister. Give it another year and she’ll leave Advent Interiors to start her own business.
Ada greets the next person in line. It is an older woman wearing too much perfume. ‘And just so you know,’ she whispers to Ada conspiratorially as her signed copy is handed back, ‘I can recommend some incredible oils to heal the scar on your back.’
‘Okay, thank you,’ says Josh, kindly but firmly moving her along.
I give him a grateful smile, reach under the table and take Ada’s hand, squeezing it in mine. She squeezes back, her smile fixed as she greets the next reader. I sign the book on autopilot, caught in the memory of paramedics dragging Ada from me the night Wisteria burned. Laying her out on the freezing January earth. Hearing one of them say there was a pulse, faint, so very, very faint, but there. The warm honey-sweet relief that she was alive, that I’d heaved her from the house. In the hospital, when she was finally awake, she thanked me for saving her.
‘No,’ I told her. ‘You saved me.’
She smiled weakly, my big sister so small in her bed, so pale and bruised. ‘We saved each other.’
A woman who is all sharp angles and a slash of red lipstick coolly hands her book to me and tells me her name is Stephanie. She turns to Ada. ‘Your letters to Elodie are beautiful.’
Ada’s letters, slipped between the pages of my prose, are the chapters most loved by our readers. Three years ago, that would’ve sent me into a tailspin of jealousy. Now, though, all I feel is pure, undiluted pride.
It wasn’t long after Wisteria burned that Ada’s car, along with Seefer and all the letters Ada had written to me, was found. In the days that followed, I sat beside her hospital bed, wires and tubes running in and out of her skin, and devoured every one of her penned entries. With each one I read, I unwrapped her, layer by layer like pass the parcel until I found my sister inside. The true her, not the too-shiny, perfect wife she pretended to be.
Ada smiles now, colour creeping into her cheeks. ‘Thank you, Stephanie.’
It’s moments like these I am glad Ada finally convinced me to write One Small Mistake. The media coverage of my disappearance meant I had my pick of publishers, just as Jack had predicted. Everything I thought I’d ever wanted was proffered to me on a silver platter, but it may as well have been a rotting, writhing dish of maggots. It had lost its appeal.
Until Ada.
‘I’ve been reading your work since you were a child. You’re talented, Ellie-Bee,’ she told me at the hospital. ‘For years, Jack manipulated you, isolated you from me, from our family. He took away Noah. Tried to take me too. Please, do not let Jack Westwood take this as well.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘If you can help just one woman recognise the red flags, maybe you can save her from her own Jack.’
She was right. But I couldn’t finish the book without Ada. The truth is, my story was never about me and Jack. It was about us. Me and my sister. It always was. ‘I heard you’re donating all your profits to a mental health charity,’ Stephanie says, snatching me from my thoughts. She enquires casually, as though my response doesn’t matter, but her focus on me is pin-sharp, the way Jack’s was when he was hunting that deer. ‘Is it true?’
I cast around for Josh. He normally swoops in to field difficult questions, but he is uncharacte?ristically absent. I finish scribbling my message and slide the book across to Ada, deciding to answer her honestly. ‘It is.’
‘Because you think Jack was mentally ill? Or because his dad was? I suppose Jack may never have done what he did if it wasn’t for how Jeffrey treated him, do you agree?’
I don’t want to profit from Jack’s death. From my abduction. And the reluctant part I played in it. That’s why I turned down an astronomical amount of money for interviews and television appearances. That’s why I turned down a career as Elodie Fray, author, and the tremendous advance Harriers offered for a follow-up novel to One Small Mistake. That’s why every penny I made from this book has been donated. But I do not tell this to the stranger in front of me because everything I’m willing to share about me and Jack and Wisteria Cottage, everything that can help other women avoid repeating my mistakes, is in the pages of this book. So I give her a non-committal shrug, trying to mask the unease that prickles across my skin in the face of her questions, and hold out Stephanie’s copy to her.