You Said Forever by Susan Lewis

Author:Susan Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Almost two weeks had passed since the day out that didn’t happen, and it was as though they were sliding slowly but inexorably into a whole other dimension of family hell. Anthony had become so stressed he was virtually impossible to talk to, and Chloe was even more erratic in her behaviour, especially towards to the little ones. She’d had several nightmares too, but she’d never say what they were about. Each time she wet the bed and punched and kicked herself, and raged so savagely that she made her mouth bleed. Worse was the way she could be perfectly calm one minute, and the next she’d start threatening to kill them all.

Charlotte hadn’t read any more of Polly’s blog since the entry about Roxanne sabotaging a family day out and the husband leaving; crazy as it seemed, she was starting to feel that by engaging with it her subconscious was seizing on some ghastly form of mimicry to make the same happen.

If she believed that, she was surely losing her mind.

So was Chloe. She was showing so many signs of going the same way as her birth mother in the peculiar things she said or did, not to mention the random, even terrifying, bursts of aggression, that Charlotte was fearing it more as each day passed.

‘Call me Ottilie,’ she’d growl out of nowhere, her eyes glittering a malicious challenge. ‘It’s my name. I want you to call me Ottilie.’

Charlotte ignored it, just like she was ignoring so much else, including the fact that Chloe had hidden the car keys – in Cooper’s kindi bag, presumably to get him into trouble – the day they were due to go to Cape Kidnappers. Though it seemed a minor issue when compared to everything else she did, it continued to grate with Charlotte, for she simply didn’t understand why Chloe would want to wreck her own day out.

Because somewhere in her tortured psyche she hadn’t felt she deserved it? Or was it because Cooper and Elodie were coming too?

She still hadn’t tackled Chloe about it because she simply couldn’t face the lies or the tantrum that would be bound to follow. She’d told Anthony she’d found them in the fridge, which could only mean that she’d left them there without thinking while putting something away.

‘You lied to Daddy,’ Chloe accused when they sat down to some social studies later in the day. (At least she’d called him Daddy on that occasion, a rare event these days.) ‘You told him the keys were in the fridge, but they weren’t.’

Charlotte regarded her coldly. ‘Does that mean you know where they were?’ she challenged.

Apparently realising she’d walked herself into a trap, Chloe ignored the question and said she was tired so she didn’t want to do any lessons today.

Charlotte didn’t doubt she was tired, she’d been up in the night and Charlotte wasn’t sure for how long. She only knew that something had woken her and when she’d tiptoed out to the landing to

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