Page 1 of The Happy Family

ONE

SADIE

The room is spinning. I can hardly breathe. I’m trying my best not to faint.

But it’s not easy.

The past year has been the worst year of my life. A total nightmare. The kind of thing you never expect to happen to you.

Somebody took my husband and my kids.

Somebody took my family.

Family. It’s the thing that drives what many of us do in life. The reason we get out of bed in the morning. The reason we keep working hard to make money in soul-crushing jobs. The reason we buy the bigger house, or the larger car, and the reason many of us count down to birthdays, or Christmas, or vacations with such excitement and anticipation.

Without family, our lives could feel very empty.

As empty as my life feels without mine.

Twelve long months of missing my two children. Of being denied the opportunity to help get them dressed in the mornings, or cook meals for them, or drive them to school and hear about their day on the way back. Twelve months since another woman took my place. Raising my kids. Sleeping with my husband. Living in the family home I worked so hard to create.

Her name is Luna.

She has everything I ever wanted.

She stole it from me.

People take things they shouldn’t all the time. Children steal penny sweets. Eager relatives or friends take the last roast potato in the dish without asking. Work colleagues might steal a co-worker’s sandwich from the staff room. But all those things can be forgiven. What cannot be forgiven is when somebody takes something precious.

Like a family.

Luna has taken mine and I’ve just figured out how she did it.

She set fire to my parents’ home and framed another woman for it.

She broke into my home and defaced my favourite family photo.

She drove a wedge between me and my husband, and while our marriage was already on shaky ground, she sent seismic shockwaves through it to finish it off.

She drugged me and caused me to fail a breathalyser test, making me lose my driving licence and ruining any chance I had of gaining custody of my children.

Then she lured me to the woods, pretending to be my husband, to get me out there alone, where I fear she planned to kill me and bury my body.

Any one of those things happening in isolation would be terrifying and too much, but all of them together, one after the other, combined to create catastrophic consequences for me and my loved ones.

I’ve been left with nothing, forced to live with my parents for lack of money and a better option.

I’ve not been sleeping. I’ve barely been functioning.

All the while, she has been thriving.

I didn’t realise she was behind all of the strange and unexplained things that had happened to me. I thought it had to be someone else. I even thought it was my husband at one point, convinced he had painstakingly plotted to get me out of his life so that he could keep our children for himself. But now I’ve worked it all out, thanks to the tip-off from Gemma, my ex-husband’s mistress, who figured it out from where she languishes in prison for a crime she did not commit. It’s not a second too soon. That’s because right now, at this very moment, Luna is living with Reid, Arthur and Ruby, my ex and our two darling children, and that means they are in danger by proximity to her.

I need to warn them. I need to get them away from Luna. I need to make sure she can’t hurt them like she hurt me.

I check the time. It’s almost midnight. Very late. Most people are sleeping now. I know my parents are and I imagine Luna, Reid and the kids are too. But there’s no way I can sleep. There’s no way I am waiting until the morning to expose Luna and the lengths she has gone to in her devastating plan to steal my family.

I have to do something now.