The Wrong Child

by M.J. Arlidge, Julia Crouch

Genres: Thrillers; Domestic Thrillers

Synopsis

A MOTHER WITH A DARK SECRET.
A DAUGHTER DYING TO TELL . . .

When 3-month-old Max is abducted, his parents are plunged into their worst nightmare. Devastated mum Sarah only took her eyes off him for a second, but that doesn't stop her guilt. Even husband, Jake, whom until now has been her rock, can't conceal his anger that their little boy went missing on her watch.

By contrast, it's all smiles and celebration at a caravan park in Lincolnshire, as baby Ronnie is introduced to his new family. Jenna and Gary are delighted with the new addition to the family. He is their fourth child and a real object of delight to their eldest - fifteen year old Becky - who once again it seems will take on the lion's share of raising the child, having dropped out of school several years ago.

But as desperate TV appeals by the Miller family make clear, trouble is brewing. Baby Max has neonatal diabetes and without regular dialysis will die. Teenager Becky is deeply troubled by the appeals that play incessantly on TV and radio, the Miller's rich relatives throwing everything at trying to smoke out the kidnappers. As her anxiety rises, as baby "Ronnie" becomes increasingly ill, a sickening realisation steals over Becky. What is the truth about her family? And how far will they go to hide their deadly secret?

A gripping, heart-wrenching thriller for fans of Cara Hunter, Heidi Perks, Claire Douglas, Fiona Barton, Susan Lewis and Lesley Kara

Release date: May 30, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 304

Sample

The first truly warm evening of the season, and the sun is just about still visible, hanging low above Greenham Common. Jenna Star sits on the caravan steps and exhales magical smoke as she hands the spliff up to Gaz, who is perched one level above her. She leans back between his legs, waving her signature scent of knocked-off Comme des Garcons Avignon up towards him.

In the space between her shoulder blades, she feels his appreciation.

They’re watching Willow, Tiger and Moon inflict their high-level training on the dogs, getting them to jump through hoops and other tricks. Their newest stunt gets them to gently topple little Moon with the word ‘Push!’ and lie on him with the word ‘Settle!’ so he can’t get up. Moon’s big brother Tiger, whose stated life dream is to be a lion tamer, thinks this is hilarious. The dogs are having fun, too, their boisterousness staying just the right side of playful. They know their humans, and would never let them come to harm, no matter how rough the play. Big sister Willow watches on, making sure things don’t get out of hand. Sensible Willow.

‘Did you like the dhal?’ Gaz asks.

‘Mmm.’ It was OK. Jenna doesn’t really do food.

‘Always tastes better cooked slow over the flames,’ he says.

She sits forward and eyes the fire. ‘Need some more wood on that.’

He slides away from under her, strides to the pile of wood he and Willow chopped and stacked last week, selects a couple of logs and chucks them on the fire, sending sparks up into the dusky air.

Tiger cheers, punching the sparks with his grubby ten-year-old fist. He loves a fire. If Jenna wasn’t certain that he would rather die than go against her, she would be concerned for the Star family safety.

She turns and looks at Nomad glowing in the firelight and sunset. She acquired the caravan two years ago. It is magnificent – a vintage 1967 showman’s van with slide-out sides. She has restyled the interior away from synthetic beige – a colour she violently dislikes – to deep red bohemian: all ancient Persian rugs, Turkish cushions, plants, and decadent comfort. She’s even put in a wood burner and a proper nice shower with handmade tiles. Everything inside Nomad has been begged, borrowed or stolen. It’s a far cry from her first van, a rackety old shoestring-converted horsebox she took as her due from Spider, a man she spent a couple of months with sixteen years ago. Boring, and bad in bed, he deserved to lose his home. Plus she had to make a rapid departure – not her first, and by no means her last – and taking the van was her only option.

There have been many vans and more men in the intervening years, but, like Nomad, Gaz is a considerable step up. He is guilty of neither of Spider’s sins and, because of this, he has earned his place under the animal skins on Jenna’s big bed for six years now.

Easy on the eye, too, all mid-length hair shaved up at the sides to reveal spiderweb tattoos, and muscles earned purely by the physical work he puts into their lifestyle, Gaz pours her another glass of red and settles back behind her.

‘Stop, everyone!’ Willow points to the horizon, where the scrubby heathland meets the sky. ‘Say goodbye to the sun.’

The shouting stops. The dogs obey and sit still. Willow is growing into quite a commanding presence. Jenna is going to have to keep an eye on that. All five Stars – Gaz has honorary status as long as he remains in the firmament – watch the big old fiery ball as it descends behind the trees and the silos.

A cheer goes up, not only from Nomad’s crew but also from the people who live in the other fifteen or so vans on the site, a field a local farmer has put to more profitable use than crops, which can’t be saying much as it’s dirt cheap to stay here.

The Stars have been here for nearly a year now, which is possibly long enough, Jenna thinks.

She stretches out her lovely, long-long legs, her full six-foot-one frame, and admires her taut belly, exposed between her tiny Indian-silk handkerchief top and the long, gathered, hip-slung skirt she lifted on her last trip to Liberty. Not in bad shape for a mother of three.

She laughs.

‘What is it, babe?’ Gaz asks.

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Or, actually, I just love how my kids watch the sun instead of idiot screens.’

‘Because you don’t give them the choice, babe.’

‘And that’s a good thing.’

‘That’s a great thing.’

‘I’m a great mother.’

‘The best.’

He gently squeezes his thighs against her and she rubs her shoulders into him.

The children return to their dog training. No bedtimes here. When they feel tired, they get themselves to bed. Even little Moon, who’s just five. Although she’s noticed that Willow has started suggesting that he goes and lies down when he starts being a pain in the arse. She’ll even read to him sometimes from the small selection of children’s books they have in the van, like a proper little Normal.

Not that Jenna approves of books. They’re just another part of the machine, after all. She’s never inflicted school on her kids. Instead, she gives them freedom, the greatest gift any child can ever dream of. Hers are always the wildest on any site, the boldest, the canniest. And yet, just one snap of her fingers and they do as they are told.

Just like the dogs.

‘You do me proud, you lot,’ she says, taking the spliff from Gaz’s rough fingers.

Moon takes a break from being bowled over by dogs to come and squeeze her knees.

‘I love you, Mum,’ he says.

She ruffles his wild hair. ‘Love you, babe.’

Reassured, he returns to his happy play with his brother and sister. Jenna moves one blue-gel-manicured hand to brush off the little bits of straw he has left on her skirt and sighs with pleasure.

It’s a loaded sound, curated to catch Gaz’s attention. And indeed, once more, she feels his appreciation firm against her back.

There is just one serpent in this paradise.

It all stems from the conversations Jenna has been having recently with Willow. The children sleep in a curtained-off rack of three bunk beds in one of the pull-out sections of the van. Until now, that’s worked well as they are tucked out of the way at night leaving the rest of the space to Jenna and Gaz. But recently, Willow has been complaining that she’s too big for the bunk. Just the other day, she showed Jenna how she can’t stretch out and has to sleep curled up.

So Jenna has decided that Willow can move onto the couch right at the front, which converts into a full-sized bed. It kind of makes sense, because these days Willow is usually the last to go to sleep, so Jenna and Gaz no longer have the van to themselves anyway. She’ll rig up a curtain for Willow to pull across so that she has a bit of privacy if that will make her happy.

What Willow would really like, and what she’s been going on about pretty constantly recently, is her own little bender. It’s a common step in the community for teenagers wanting a bit of privacy to move out into some sort of independent structure – a bender made from branches and tarp or a small van of their own. Indeed, Hope next door has just got one from her ditsy, devoted mum, and this is probably what set Willow off.

But Jenna isn’t a big fan of that idea because beyond the confines of the van at night, Willow could get up to anything. Jenna’s seen the way boys look at her – she’s a pretty thing, not quite on the same level as Jenna was at sixteen, but still, she’s learned style from her, and can really pull it off.

Gaz reaches down and puts his hand under her handkerchief top, placing it on her small, perfectly formed breast. She rolls her shoulders again so they rub into his inner thighs.

The children play on. She’s taught them not to have any hang-ups about what adults do with each other. They don’t even notice, really. It’s not as if they’re unaware of what goes on in the bedroom at night. Not every detail, of course. That wouldn’t be right. But Jenna finds it impossible to be quiet during sex. Especially with Gaz, whom she has taught well. It’s only natural, after all, and it’s how people managed to have fifteen, sixteen children when the whole family slept in one room.

She sighs with pleasure at the thought of what’s going to happen later.

But the serpent returns, snaking around her sense of contentment. With Willow moved onto the couch, that leaves one spare bed, one empty nest in Nomad.

It’s not as if she would want fifteen or sixteen kids, but one more wouldn’t do any harm. Then her life would be complete. Her happiness constant. Her itch scratched.

She turns and puts her elbows on Gaz’s knees.

‘I want another baby.’

‘Whoah,’ Gaz says. Although the thought has been brewing for a while now, this is the first time she has ever mentioned it to him.

She reaches her fingers up and twines them into his lovely hair.

‘Just one more.’

He frowns. But he has never said no to her before, so she knows this is just a formality, a game he has to play to make himself feel like he has some sort of power in this situation.

She gently pulls his face down towards hers. ‘And that will be that,’ she coos into his ear. ‘No more after that.’ Her tongue follows her words.

He loves that.

He sighs and shudders.

Behind her, the children shout louder, the night descends, the fire crackles.

‘And this would definitely be the last?’

‘The very last.’ She puts a hand on his groin.

‘So this time you leave Daisy.’

She pulls away. ‘What?’

‘If you mean it about being the last, you get rid of Daisy.’

She smiles. He’s cleverer sometimes than she gives him credit for. But she wants a new baby more than she wants to hold onto Daisy. And it will be a great symbolic act, a final severance from her childhood. Some people believe they were born into the wrong body. But Jenna loves her body. Why wouldn’t she? No, she was born into the wrong family, into the wrong house.

She was the original changeling.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ll get rid of Daisy.’

He nods. ‘Good.’

She stands, takes him by the hand. ‘Let’s go and do the Special Thing.’

He looks at her with his warm, brown eyes. Special Thing is a rare treat for him.

‘Willow, help the boys to bed when they’re ready,’ Jenna says, without looking back.

She leads him to the animal skins on her bed.

Like a dog, he follows.

Sarah is worried that her breast pads are nearing their limit. She’s going to mess up her one remaining good shirt, the red gingham Vivienne Westwood she got by way of TK Maxx.

Meanwhile, Max is still fussing in his buggy, pushing out his mittened fists, kicking his legs. But at least he’s not crying anymore, and the dagger stares from diners around them in Zizzi Newbury are dying down.

She’s still sweating, though.

Lisa’s telling her some complicated story about what Robert at work said to her the other day and how it was borderline creepy. Well of course, whatever Robert says to any woman is going to be well beyond borderline creepy. Not that Sarah’s going to have to worry about that anymore.

‘I’m not going back,’ she says, out of nowhere, interrupting Lisa’s flow.

‘What?’ Lisa says.

‘Max is sick. I’m not going to be able to come back to work. Not with him, Hannah and Tom to look after.’

‘He’s sick?’ Lisa asks, her forkful of prawn linguine halfway to her mouth.

‘And Jake’s a chocolate teapot.’ Sarah looks gloomily at her own plate, a slab of six-layer lasagne. She is not going to lose her baby bulge today.

‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘Too busy looking after other people’s children to spend any time with his own—’

‘I mean Max.’

‘—He sold being made deputy head as nothing but a good thing – more money, less homework to mark.’

‘Sarah, what’s the matter with Max?’

Sarah sighs, puts down her fork and gazes into the mid-distance. ‘Neonatal diabetes.’

Lisa looks down at Max, who is still fighting sleep. ‘But they can control it, yes?’

‘They don’t know.’ Sarah can’t bear to talk about it anymore, having had to explain it over and over to so many people. She hands Lisa the leaflet the consultant gave her this morning.

Lisa takes a slug from her large glass of Sauvignon Blanc and squints at the leaflet. ‘What’s the treatment?’

‘Lots of check-ups. And he has to take medicine every day.’

‘He’ll grow out of it, yeah?’

‘They don’t know.’

Lisa hands back the leaflet. ‘My cousin has diabetes and he’s fine.’

‘Neonatal’s different. Yes, he can’t control his blood sugar. But he might also have developmental delays, possibly learning difficulties.’

Lisa reaches out and takes her hand. ‘Oh, Sarah.’

Sarah resists the urge to pull her fingers away. ‘They don’t know for sure. All they can do, apparently, is keep testing him. And testing him, and testing him.’ Sarah looks over at her sick little baby and sighs. His birth – no, her pregnancy – was like a bomb going off in her life. ‘I don’t have time for anything else.’

‘Well, you’re looking really well on it,’ Lisa says, picking up her fork again.

‘I look like a bag of shite.’

‘No. You’re glowing. Motherhood suits you.’

Glowing means fat, of course. Sarah is on the verge of tears. ‘I wish I could come back to work, though.’

‘It’s hell at the moment, really is. We’ve got ten jobs with six different developers on the go at once, deadlines all within a couple of weeks. The clients all want cool neutral, but we’ve got to make each show home different.’

Sarah tries a smile, but it’s forced. ‘How many shades of beige can you come up with?’

‘Tell me about it. Believe me, you’re best off out of it.’

But Sarah’s mind is racing, flipping through imaginary swatch books, grabbing images from websites, putting mood boards together. She sees herself as she was a year ago, before her third maternity leave, in her smart Hobbs dress and kitten heels, sitting at her Mac in the clean, white office. Everything so ordered, the tasks so finite.

And now her day-to-day is banana-stained t-shirts, pooey nappies, pissy potties, endless small plates of snacks for Hannah and Tom, never finishing a task, never having enough sleep, never being able to have just five minutes for a wash or a wee. Her make-up bag, full of Bobbi Brown, lies unopened somewhere on top of her bedroom drawers, underneath piles and piles of washing waiting to be sorted and folded and put away. And then, all the time, this new baby crying and crying and being a source of constant worry. Is he in pain? Is he hungry/thirsty/tired? Is he going to have another fit?

Is he going to die?

The horror of his rare moments of stillness and sleep. Moments that should give her release, but which just find her constantly checking that he’s still breathing.

Her day-to-day is chaos, struggle and guilt that she is not giving each child enough attention, guilt that she is letting herself go, guilt that she is not enjoying herself. Not enjoying herself one tiny jot.

Three under three. She would not recommend it to her worst enemy. It’s a kind of torture. And when she thinks that she is only in this position by accident . . .

Max stirs and gives out the great shuddering sigh that follows a crying spell and signifies the possibility that he might, just might, settle now.

Max. Her accident.

‘You’re so lucky, though,’ Lisa says. ‘Baby days. What a gift.’

She doesn’t say it outright – she has too much pride – but Sarah knows that Lisa is jealous. She and Jonno have been trying for three years and, having suffered three miscarriages, are going through the early stages of fertility treatment.

She looks into Lisa’s eyes and sees all that loss and longing. She can’t bear it. She wants to wipe it out. And with that urge comes cruelty and truth.

‘I didn’t want him,’ she says.

Lisa lowers her eyes and takes another mouthful, chewing. But it looks as if the pasta might get stuck in her throat.

‘He was a complete accident,’ Sarah ploughs on. ‘I was still breastfeeding Tom. You’re not supposed to get pregnant when you’re breastfeeding.’

Lisa looks at her, frostier than her glass of wine. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

Sarah can feel it all welling up inside her, the words she hasn’t been able to say to anyone. Although they are more work colleagues than best buddies, Lisa is the closest friend she has these days. Everyone else got lost in the pile of work and family commitments.

This lunch is the first time she has been out socially in over a year. And even though Jake’s parents said they were willing to have Max for a couple of hours with the other two, Lisa had insisted on her bringing him. ‘I’m desperate to see the baby,’ she said when she called to make the arrangement. She isn’t desperate for what she is about to get, though. But Sarah’s on a roll now. If she keeps all this to herself for a moment longer, she is going to explode.

‘I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope. Jake said he’d help out more, come back home at five, be around at weekends. Three children. The childcare costs would have been more than my salary. He said I could give up work for a couple of years, concentrate on the babies, then go back when Hannah and Tom were in school.’

‘You could see it as a gift. The baby days are short, just a small part of our lives.’

‘Yeah.’ The platitudes put a taste of viciousness in Sarah’s mouth. ‘He mentioned you, how you would give your right arm to be in my position.’

Lisa purses her lips. ‘He’s not wrong,’ she says in a low voice that has just a hint of danger in it.

Sarah sticks her knife into her lasagne. ‘I wanted an abortion.’

Lisa sucks in her breath. She reaches for a steadying glug of white wine. Then another. It’s warm in here – the air-con doesn’t appear to be working. Even so, her face is clearly flushed with more than just heat.

‘I didn’t want Max to be born,’ Sarah goes on as she automatically carves her food into small, toddler-sized bites. ‘I wanted to keep my job, put on my nice clothes, go out to work. And I wanted Jake to come home at five on weekdays and share weekends with me. I didn’t want another baby just to make him step up to his obligations as a father. But he talked me into keeping it.

‘Him,’ Lisa says. ‘Keeping him.’

‘He cried, he pleaded with me and when that didn’t work he tried threats, like I would regret it for the rest of my life, that we’d never recover from it, that I was tantamount to being a murderer.’

Lisa puts down her glass so firmly that some of the wine slops over the side. ‘Jake’s a good man.’

Sarah shoots back at her. ‘He said if I had an abortion, he’d never be able to look me in the eye.’

Lisa picks her napkin off her lap and crumples it onto the table beside her half-eaten pasta. ‘Perhaps he was just telling the truth. Excuse me.’ She picks up her handbag and heads for the ladies. A few people turn to look at Sarah. They have been earwigging. A sixty-something woman is staring right at her, eyebrow raised.

‘What?’ Sarah says, like some sort of truculent fourteen-year-old.

‘You would have regretted it your whole life,’ the woman says, not unkindly.

Sarah purses her lips and reaches for the wine bottle. Even strangers are on Jake’s side. She’d said she would only have one glass because of her milk, but it’s been three years now of holding back and she is sick to death of it. She fills her glass, knocks it back and refills it.

Max sleeps, his face like a little angel’s. She can barely look at him. She tries to stop her mouth from turning downwards. She has been awful. Abominable. A terrible person.

Finally, Lisa returns, a couple of water spots on her otherwise pristine white blouse, which, along with the red rims around her eyelashes, is a clear indication that she has been splashing her eyes after crying. She has also put on a fresh coat of lipstick, which hints to Sarah that she wants this lunch to be over soon, that she wants to head back to the office.

Even Lisa knows life is safer and easier there.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah says, avoiding her gaze.

Lisa sits and settles her shoulders like a bird busying itself into its nest. ‘It’s OK. We all have issues.’

Sarah looks over at Max, her very pressing issue. ‘Worst-case scenario, he could need lifetime care. I may never be able to work again.’

Once more, she sees herself in her white office, where she sat for twelve years, working her way up the design team. What was it all for?

Her breasts leak. Her eyes leak. She is just a big old saggy bag of liquids.

‘Work isn’t everything,’ Lisa says.

From where Sarah’s sitting, it is. It really is.

‘Are we finished?’ A young waiter hovers into view, casting a mildly and no doubt habitually flirtatious eye over Lisa. He doesn’t even acknowledge soggy Sarah and her now slumbering, flawed baby.

‘Do you want a pudding?’ Lisa asks, in a way that makes it utterly clear she is expecting Sarah to decline the offer.

Sarah shakes her head, although her breastfeeding calorie deficit is making her body cry out for sugar. She’ll get an ice cream from the van in the park in a bit. When there’s no one around to judge her.

‘I’ll have the bill please,’ Lisa says to the flirty boy.

Sarah makes to get her wallet from the changing bag that Jake’s mother so lovingly embroidered with Max’s name in tangerine wool.

Lisa waves her hand. ‘My treat.’

Ha. Treat.

‘I wish I could have had a cuddle,’ Lisa says as they step out, blinking, into the bright, sunlit precinct.

‘He’s just so fussy,’ Sarah says. ‘I needed him to sleep. He needed to sleep.’

Lisa’s face closes up like the door on a train that’s about to depart. She sighs, smiles brightly and leans in to kiss Sarah on the cheek.

‘Thank you for the lunch,’ Sarah says.

‘We must do this again sometime,’ Lisa says. She turns on her heel and hurries to the taxi rank to get a cab back to the office.

Must we? Sarah thinks. She rubs her cheek where, no doubt, Lisa has left some of her newly applied lipstick. Max stirs and starts fussing. She reaches under his buggy for the changing bag and pulls out a muslin, which she clips over the hood, partly to shield him from the bright sunlight, partly so she doesn’t have to see him.

As Max ramps up his complaining, she runs into the Tesco Metro over the road and picks up two four-pint bottles of milk which she stashes under the buggy. Jake’s parents, who are looking after the other two back at the house, drink endless cups of tea, and then there’s never any left for breakfast.

By the time she’s back on the pavement, she has an hour until she has to relieve Anne and Nige from their duties. Max is grizzling behind the muslin. Her whole body feels like a lump of lasagne in this heat.

She needs a bit of space.

Plugging in her headphones, she heads for the park.

Loud, on repeat in her ears, is her secret weapon of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’, the theme song of her teenage years which, if she hadn’t buckled down and become a good girl, might have led her astray.

She has been a responsible adult for far too long.

She’s going to get a fucking ice cream.

Jake steams down the corridor, feeling, in every way except his outfit, like Superman. If it weren’t for the chattering river of Year Eights bubbling along the corridor in the opposite direction, he would punch the air and click his heels together because the geography lesson he has just given Year Nine – his classic oxbow lake session – was an utter belter.

With his recent promotion to deputy head, he doesn’t often get the opportunity to strut his stuff in the classroom. But Mrs Robbins, the almost terminally delicate geography teacher, is off sick today, so he jumped at the chance to save on a supply teacher.

He knows he shouldn’t, but he gets a real kick when a kid tells him that his lessons are so much more fun than Mrs Robbins’s.

He ignores a couple of Year Eleven girls, who giggle as he passes. His nickname among the older kids is, apparently, Peng Lad. While it doesn’t quite convey the dignity fitting of his station, it makes him smile.

But now he has to get back to his office and check that Bea – the assistant he has on loan while Mike Peterson, the actual headmaster, is off with burnout – is on it with the preparation for tomorrow’s OFSTED visit. The inspector made the call as Jake headed off to class, so he’s got his work cut out for the rest of the day, making preparations and warning staff that tomorrow they will come under close scrutiny.

Had it been any other assistant, he would have got someone else to sit in while Year Nine drew maps or something, but Bea is more than up to the task. Every day he counts his blessings that he has her as his wing-woman. Although she is only twenty-seven, she started at the school as soon as she finished A levels here, and this will be her third OFSTED. In the past he was just a humble teacher under inspection, so she is actually more experienced than him at leading the process.

He opens the door to the head teacher’s suite and there she is at her desk in the little lobby before the main room, opposite the chair where naughty kids sit waiting for a bollocking – or guidance, as he prefers to think of it. The air is scented with what he imagines is her coconut body spray.

She looks up at him and smiles, her white teeth flashing. ‘Hi.’ Her pink lipstick is fresh and perfect. He has never met such a well-groomed woman. ‘How did it go?’

‘Smashed it,’ he says, smiling. She laughs and twirls a strand of honey-blonde hair around her finger.

He tries not to draw comparisons with the state of Sarah when he left at seven this morning. He knows three under three is an enormous challenge, but sometimes he barely recognises her these days.

She was stooping over the kitchen worktop in her tatty dressing gown, her hair unwashed, unbrushed and dark at the roots. Buttering toast for Hannah and Tom, she had her back turned to Max, who was screaming for milk, his nappy stinkingly full.

Jake offered to help, but she just told him that she could cope and he should get to work. But the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it – pureed pea from last night crusted on the table, the dishwasher open, half emptied, half filled with dirty dishes, every surface crowded with used milk bottles and plastic bowls and sippy cups.

Ignoring her protests, he’d lifted Max from the high chair and taken him up to the bathroom to change him. Despite his stressful job and the extra responsibilities of his position while Mike is off, he puts in as much time as he possibly can while he’s at home. He can’t remember the last time he sat down and read a novel, or played tennis, or even went to the gym.

He and Sarah used to enjoy going to the gym together.

He used to enjoy Sarah’s gym body, especially when she got obsessed with boxing.

Sarah used to take such pride in herself and the house. Indeed, it had often looked like one of the show homes she designed at work. She used to pay him attention, too. These days, the house is filthy and cluttered and he seems to be little more than an unwelcome obstacle on her path to chaos and decay.

He wishes she would let him help her more. But first she bats him away, and then she attacks him for not supporting her.

What can a man do?

Sometimes he even gets angry about it. If he truly interrogates his reaction, which he tries to do, he sees that the root of it is his feelings of powerlessness as all his hopes for their marriage blur and fade.

Their wedding was the best day of his life. All polished shoes and smart clothes a. . .