Page 4 of The Happy Family

I could say something in response. Something clever, or sinister, or dramatic. But I don’t. I just nod. Then I raise the hedge clippers so that the blade is pointed right at my nemesis.

After all, actions speak louder than words.

THREE

SADIE

I stare at the sharp weapon seconds away from snaring me and realise I have walked right into danger.

I should have planned this better. I should have gone to the police. I should have known that Luna was always one step ahead of me. But now I’m here and it’s too late.

She’s going to try and kill me.

She’s going to keep my family.

‘Wait!’ I say, raising my hands in front of myself as if they would be any match for the clippers were Luna to lunge forward and attack me with them. She must know that they are not, but I’m doing my best to appear unthreatening, if only so it slows her down and gives me the chance to avoid meeting a terrible fate in this garage that I used to call my own.

To my left is where I kept the children’s outdoor toys. Their bicycles. A plastic slide. A swing set. It’s not the time of year for those things now, which is why they are housed in here for storage during the colder months, but I used to be the one who decided when it was time for them to come back out again. I used to be the one who would see the smiles on Arthur and Ruby’s faces when I decreed that summer had started and the time for outdoor fun had begun. Now Luna has that responsibility, one that she does not deserve because she did not earn it fairly.

On the opposite side of the garage to the toys is where I used to leave all the discarded cardboard boxes and packaging from the parcels I would order online. They were left here for Reid to put into his car and take to the recycling centre once a month or so, a chore he complained about but always did because he knew that shopping was just part of my personality. It’s not as if I didn’t spend money on him too, so some of those cardboard boxes had been full of things for him. But they were all boxes and packages that the woman standing in front of me now delivered to this house herself.

Then, she just seemed like a normal delivery driver.

An unimposing, unremarkable woman doing her day job.

Right up until the moment she took everything from me.

‘You’ll never get away with this,’ I say to lunatic Luna, a nickname she has surely earned and one the media may use if I am successful in revealing the extent of her crimes. ‘If you kill me here, how will you explain it? The police will arrest you, and Reid will leave you, and all of this will have been in vain. You realise that, right?’

Luna pauses and, hopefully, she knows that I am correct.

‘Do you understand what I am truly capable of?’ she asks me then, a menacing tone to her voice that sends a chill through my body in this already cold garage. ‘If you think I cannot kill you and get away with it, you really haven’t figured out who I am at all.’

That ominous statement makes me aware that Luna does not fear taking a chance and killing me right now because she obviously trusts her skills in getting away with it. That confidence must come from experience, and if so, I figure she has killed before. I think about how my son told me that he saw her recently on a street where a man was later found dead and I wondered if she could have been involved. Now I don’t doubt it.

I can see from the look in her eyes that Luna is already a murderer.

But will I be her next victim?

‘Why me?’ I ask desperately. ‘Why us? Why my family?’

‘Why not?’ comes the cold reply.

‘I don’t understand. What made us special? What made us stand out? You must have delivered parcels to hundreds of homes. Why not ruin any of those families? Why ruin mine?’

‘Because you had it all,’ Luna tells me, and I notice she lowers the clippers slightly as she speaks, though I’m hardly going to point that out to her because I want to keep her distracted. ‘You had everything. The handsome husband. The cute children. The huge house. You were living the dream, and I bet you didn’t even know it.’

‘Of course I did! I knew how lucky I was to have my family!’ I cry. ‘Who are you to say that I took them for granted?’

‘You did take them for granted because that’s what everyone who has things does. It’s only the people who have nothing who understand the true value of those things that others have. The value of having a supportive partner to sleep beside every night. The value of seeing smiling faces at breakfast time and bedtime. The value of living in a place that is cosy and warm and comforting, rather than soul-destroying and cheap and dangerous.’

Luna’s words are giving me a valuable insight into the life she had before she came into mine, but even so, how can it be my fault for her circumstances?

‘I’m sorry if you hated your life, but that doesn’t give you the right to ruin mine,’ I snap back. ‘I worked hard to build everything I had. Reid and I had a long relationship. I raised my children for years. I poured my heart and soul into this house. I did everything I was supposed to do. I was a good wife and mother. Then you took it all from me.’

‘It was already falling apart,’ Luna says rather bluntly then. ‘I exposed the cracks in the foundations and took my opportunity to switch places with you when I saw that I could do a better job.’

‘You know nothing about my family,’ I snarl, and for a moment, it seems both Luna and I are more focused on winning an argument than using the hedge clippers that still loom ominously between us.