Page 63 of The Girlfriend’s Secret

I take out my phone and open the app that I downloaded earlier. I have no idea if it will work as I hope it will, only that I have trusted what I have read online and it all seems legit. But there’s only one way to find out if it will work for me right now.

I see a black screen and turn up the volume, holding my breath as I do because this is the moment of truth.

‘Can you pass the rice, please?’

I swear my heart skips a beat as I hear Frederik’s voice loud and clear through my phone. A moment later, I hear more.

‘You really need to try these buns, they’re delicious.’

That was Scott.

‘I will if you stop eating them all,’ replies Joel, and now I know there are at least three of them there, sitting together and clearly enjoying their meal. But where is the fourth member of the family? Where is the one voice I need to hear more than any other?

Where is Liane?

‘I knew we should have ordered more,’ I suddenly hear her say and I breathe a strong sigh of relief. She is there and like everybody else she is having dinner with, I can hear her voice loud and clear.

That’s crucial.

As I keep listening in on the ‘private’ conversation occurring at a house only fifteen minutes away from the one I’m sitting in, I think about how it was in this room where I sit alone when my plan’s success moved from ‘possible’ to ‘likely’. It was in here where, with the help of Scott, I told Frederik what needed to happen next.

I had no idea if it would work.

I had no idea if he would listen to me.

I had no idea if he would choose Liane and love over me and justice.

But I got my answer in the end.

‘What’s going on here?’ Frederik had said as he entered Valerie’s house with his eldest son to find me waiting for them both.

‘Just calm down, Dad, and listen to what we have to say,’ Scott had told his father.

‘You shouldn’t be in here,’ Frederik had said to me. ‘How did you get in? We thought you were gone.’

‘Dad, please, just let us explain,’ Scott had pleaded again and, thankfully, Frederik had fallen quiet long enough for us to try and do just that.

‘I’m so sorry to tell you this, but your wife has been lying to you,’ I had said as gently as I could. ‘She’s been lying to us all.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Frederik had snapped back.

‘She’s talking about Valerie,’ Scott had interjected, and I was thankful he was there to provide support because it would have been impossible to convince Frederik on my own. ‘She’s talking about how she died.’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I had explained to Frederik. ‘She didn’t just fall down the stairs. She was pushed. By Liane.’

FORTY-FIVE

HAVEN

THE DAY BEFORE

I’d imagined what Frederik’s reaction would be to that statement multiple times in my head, running through every possible scenario I could think of ahead of the difficult conversation in which I called his wife a killer. From him getting angry and denying it, to him breaking down in tears when he realised he was married to a monster, I thought I’d envisioned and prepared for it all. But I wasn’t ready for what came next.

‘I knew something was wrong,’ Frederik had said, looking like a man who had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Scott and I had shared a look as Frederik had taken a seat, looking sad but also stoic, like this was cutting him up but he was also prepared for it, in a strange way.

‘I could see that her mother’s death hadn’t affected her in a normal way,’ he had said. ‘She acted sad. But she wasn’t. I knew there was something. I just…’