“This is your new room. Do you like it?” Maggie asks.

I do like it, so I’m not sure why I wet myself.

I haven’t had an accident in my pants for a really long time. I think maybe the walls made of corks, the tall stairs, and the man with the gold tooth might have frightened the pee right out of me. I feel a hot trickle of it run down the inside of my leg, and I can’t seem to make it stop. I hope Maggie won’t notice, but when I look at the pink carpet, there is a dark patch between my shoes. She sees it then, and her smiley round face changes into something cross and pointy.

“Only babies wet themselves.” She hits me hard across the face. I’ve seen Daddy hit my brother like that, but nobody has ever done it to me before. My cheek hurts and I start to cry again. “Grow up, it was just a slap.” Maggie picks me up, holding me as far away from her as she can with straight arms. She marches back out into the hall and through the door nearest the top of the stairs. It’s a small kitchen. The floor is covered in lines of strange, squishy green carpet, with words written on it, and the cupboards are all different shapes and sizes and made from different-colored wood. Another door at the end of the kitchen leads to a bathroom. Everything in it is green; the toilet, the sink, the bath, the carpet, and the tiles on the wall. I think Maggie must really like the color. She puts me down inside the bath and leaves the room, then comes straight back, with a big black bin bag. I worry that she wants to throw me away with the rubbish.

“Take your clothes off,” she says.

I don’t want to.

“I said take your clothes off!”

I still don’t move.

“Now.” It sounds as if the word got stuck behind her teeth. She seems awful cross, so I do as she says.

When all my clothes, including my wet pants, are in the bin bag, she picks up a little white plastic hose that is attached to the tap in the bath. “The boiler is on the blink, so you’ll have to make do.” She hoses me down. The water is freezing and it makes me gasp for my breath, like when I fell out of the fishing boat once at home and the cold black sea tried to swallow me. Maggie squirts shampoo on my head and roughly rubs it into my hair. The yellow bottle says No More Tears, but I’m crying. When I am covered in soap from my head to my feet, she sprays me all over with cold water again. I try to keep still the way she tells me to, but my body shivers and my teeth chatter like they do in winter.

When she is finished, she dries me with a stiff green towel, then she marches me back to my new bedroom and sits me down on the bed covered in rainbows. I don’t have any clothes and I’m cold. She leaves the room for a moment, and I hear her talking to the man who said he was my new dad, even though I’ve never seen him before.

“She looks just like her,” he says, before Maggie comes back in with a glass of milk.

“Drink it.”

I hold the glass in both hands and take a couple of sips. It tastes chalky and strange, just like the milk she gave me in the house that was for holidays.

“All of it,” she says.

When the glass is empty, I see that she is wearing her smiley round face again, and I am glad. I don’t like her other one, it scares me. She opens a drawer and pulls out a pair of pink pajamas. She helps me to put them on, then makes me stand in front of the mirror.

The first thing I notice is my hair. It’s much shorter than it was the last time I saw myself and stops at my chin.

“Where has my hair gone?” I start to cry, but Maggie raises her hand so I stop.

“It was too long and needed cutting. It will grow back.”

I stare at at the little girl in the mirror. Her pink pajama top has a word written on it made of five letters: AIMEE. I don’t know what it means.

“Do you want a bedtime story?”

I nod that I would.

“Has the cat got your tongue?”

I haven’t seen a cat and I think my tongue is still inside my mouth, I wiggle it behind my lips to be sure.

She walks over to a shelf stacked with colorful magazines and takes the top one off the pile. “Can you read?”

“Yes.” I stick my chin out a little without knowing why. “My brother taught me.”

“Well, wasn’t that nice of him. You can read this to yourself then. There’s a whole pile of Story Teller magazines here, and cassette tapes, too, so you just go ahead whenever you want to. Gobbolino is your favorite.” She throws the magazine onto the bed. “The witch’s cat,” she adds, when I don’t say anything. I don’t even like cats so I wish she’d stop talking about them. “If you can read, then tell me what it says on your top.”

I stare at it, but the letters are upside down.

“It says Aimee. That’s your new name from now on. It means ‘loved.’ You do want people to love you, don’t you?”

“But I’m called Ciara.” I look up at her.

“Not anymore you’re not, and if you ever use that name under this roof again, you’ll find yourself in very big trouble.”

Fifteen

London, 2017

I’m in trouble.

The detective has clearly already made up her mind about me, but she’s wrong. The only thing I’m guilty of is fraud, the relationship variety. We all sometimes pretend to love something or someone we don’t: an unwanted gift, a friend’s new haircut, a husband. We’ve evolved to be so good at it, we can even fool ourselves. It’s more laziness than deceit; to acknowledge when the love has run out would mean having to do something about it. Relationship fraud is endemic nowadays.

As soon as the detectives leave, I lock the door behind them, desperate to shut the whole world out. I guess I can now add the police to the list of people who think they know me. They’re in good company, with the press, the fans, and my so-called friends. But they don’t know me. Only the version of myself I let them see. The wheels of my mind continue to drive in the wrong direction, stuck in reverse, and I relive that night, remembering things I’d rather not. We did argue in the restaurant. Detective Croft is right about that. Ben accused me of having an affair, again. I tried so hard to reassure him, but he just got more and more angry.

“Successful actresses are either beautiful or they’re good at acting…”

The more he drank, the worse it got.

“You are neither of those things.”

It was as though he wanted to hurt me, provoke a reaction.

“I keep wondering who you fucked this time to get the part.”

He succeeded.

I didn’t mean to slap him, I know I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m deeply ashamed of myself. But I’ve spent a lifetime thinking that I wasn’t good enough, and his cruel words echoed my own insecurities so loud and clear, something inside me just snapped. I’ve never felt that I’m good enough at anything; no matter how hard I try, I just don’t fit. If my husband can see it, then surely it’s only a matter of time until everyone else sees it too.

My response wasn’t just physical. I told him I wanted a divorce, because I wanted to hurt him back. If he had let me have the child I wanted, I would have given up the career he said had come between us, but the answer was always the same: no. He didn’t trust me in more ways than one. We were going weeks, sometimes months, without a shred of intimacy, as though touching me might accidentally get me pregnant. I’m so lonely now it physically hurts.