Page 29 of A Game of Lies

Kat can’t look away. She can’t breathe. She watches Henry unlock the box and flick through the seven envelopes inside, looking for the one markedJason.

‘Mum?’ The lounge door opens and Aimee-Leigh comes in, rubbing her eyes.

Everything happens at once.

A close-up on the envelope as Roxy opens it. A cut away to Henry’s earlier accusation.I expose Jason. Contestants’ faces. Aimee-Leigh’s excitement. ‘Dad! You said he’d left! Is he back in?’

I expose Jason as a bigamist.

The open envelope. Henry’s relieved yet guilty expression. Jason’s despair.

‘Mum, what’s a bigamist?’

The room spins.

On screen, Roxy is talking to viewers. Jason is saying a muted farewell to every one of his fellow contestants except Henry, at whom he shoots a murderous look.

At home, Kat’s tears have dried up. She switches off the telly and pulls her daughter in for a cuddle. Her phone is going mad, but it couldn’t be as mad as Kat herself.

Her husband has another wife.

Kat’s going to bloody kill him.

TEN

THURSDAY | FFION

‘Inside. Quick.’ Ffion glances both ways up the narrow street. Her tiny rented house is in a terraced street on the opposite side of Cwm Coed from Mam’s house. The houses are red brick with slate roofs, and would once have been identical, before new owners replaced windows and painted doors and had little porches built for their coats and boots. There are no yards and no rear entrances, making it a challenge to come and go without an audience.

Ffion pulls the front door shut. ‘Did anyone see you?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m not stupid. Now cough up.’

Ffion hands over a tenner. ‘That’s all the cash I’ve got.’

‘I take PayPal.’ Seren smiles sweetly. ‘Unless you’d like me to tell Mam I’m spending the day here instead of in the library …’

But Ffion’s already on her phone, transferring another twenty quid to Seren’s account. ‘Who taught you how to blackmail?’ she mutters.

‘My mam.’

The two women lock eyes for a second. Ffion shakes her head and lets out a laugh.

Seren was sixteen when she found out that Ffion wasn’t her sister but her mother. Only sixteen herself when she’d given birth, Ffion had gone along with Mam’s idea – even made herself think it was for the best. As Seren grew up, the family secret had become so long-buried, it felt like the truth.

It had shattered Seren’s world when she’d found out. She hadn’t spoken to Ffion for days, and when she did, the hurt in her eyes had almost broken Ffion’s heart. ‘I don’t know how tobe,’ Seren had said. ‘You were my sister, and I knew how to be around you. But now …’

It had been months before they’d settled into a new normal. Everything had changed, and yet, in many ways, nothing had. Ffion had a go at Seren, the way she always had. Seren backchatted her, the way she always had. They both called MamMam, the way they always had.

What had changed was deeper than that. It was in the unfiltered way Ffion felt when Seren was watching telly in her PJs, her hair still damp from the shower. It was in the way she felt when Seren came home an hour later than agreed. Revealing the truth had been like peeling off a layer, and everything Ffion felt was more raw, more vivid.

Seren flops on to the sofa and picks up the remote.

‘You’re here to revise, not watch TV.’ Ffion didn’t dare ask Mam to have Dave again, not after his remake ofThe Great Escape. She figures Dave will be more settled in his own house, and Seren can study as easily at Ffion’s house as in the library. Mam does not share this view, hence the subterfuge.

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