Her Perfect Life: A gripping debut psychological thriller with a killer twist

‘Alicia what?’

‘Sandelson.’

She struggles to her feet. He moves towards her.

‘Don’t come near me!’

He lifts his hands and watches her leave.

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That night Tom sleeps in the spare room and Gracie lies awake, listening to the drum of the rain and picturing Alicia touching her things, lying between her sheets, pushing her face into her pillow and she wonders how she will survive. Yet when she tries to imagine a life other than this one she has built with Tom all she sees is a vast emptiness devoid of joy or comfort or hope. This is the way she had felt in the bleak, lonely months before she met him, the way she’d thought she would never have to feel again. She reaches for her mobile then lets it drop. Daphne is in Milan, probably in bed with her latest lover, and even if she picked up what would Gracie say? What’s happening inside her is too frightening, too visceral to explain, even to her closest friend.

She slips out of bed and tiptoes downstairs, past the photographs that hang on the open brickwork. Stark looming images, shot by Louise, charting the first stages of the creation of the house. Gracie thought she knew them, every line and shadow; the demolition of the old wharf, the bulldozers arriving in a scarred expanse of moss-grown debris, spindly saplings thrust into the wind, the writhing tree root washed up by the tide, dead but for one determined shoot of green. But tonight, in the dim light of the lamp left on for Elsie, they seem alive, taunting her with renewed power and vigour; her own face, puffy with crying, a wavery distraction in the glass. Her eyes fasten on the photo of the tree root. Taken the day Louise found the plot of land, the shot has been reprinted on a thousand posters and postcards, variously interpreted as an image of hope, regeneration and a dogged refusal to die. The Observer magazine used it in their memorial tribute to Louise’s work, along with the most haunting of the worn faces and desolate landscapes she’d taken for them in Bosnia, Albania and Darfur. Gracie’s legs buckle. She reaches for the wall, imagining Alicia pausing here on her way to the bedroom, halted by this picture. Did Tom stand behind her, holding her shoulders, kissing her neck as he’d once kissed Gracie’s when she’d stopped, drawn by this same photograph, in the hallway of his flat in Holloway?

She pulls away and stumbles down to the kitchen. She feels the cool slate beneath her feet, sees the pearly shadows of the raindrops speckling the white of the walls and the square of sky above the light well, all realised exactly as Louise had envisaged them, the DNA of her vision imprinted not just in the design and structure of this house but in the subtle ageing of the wood, the ever changing reflections in the angled glass and the long slow weathering of the stone.

Gracie sits in the dark for nearly an hour before she drags herself back to bed. She closes her eyes, too tired to fight it now. Cogs uncouple in her head, dismantling her defences, and she sleeps. For a while she hovers in a restless dark. And then it begins. The dreadful pitch into a ruined landscape where she runs and runs from someone she can’t see until the way is blocked by an iron gate fastened by a padlock and chain. Forced on by a brush of breath on her neck she swerves away, stumbling through the doors of a blackened warehouse and spiralling down a stone staircase until she senses a flutter of movement in the shadows and trips and falls like dreamers do, to wake with a buck of panic, struggling to scream. She reaches for Tom. Her bed is empty. He is not there to turn in his sleep, pull her to him and murmur that she is safe.

She rises and moves around the house, tormented by reminders of the contentment she has lost – a snapshot of the three of them stuck on the fridge, their joint names on a school permission form, their shirts and socks entangled in the dryer, all cruelly untouched by the savage unravelling of her grief. She takes down the snapshot and gazes at the faces – hers, Tom’s and Elsie’s – trying to envision a future untainted by the fear of losing everything she loves.

Over the next few days Tom gives her time, something he’s been careless about for a while. He talks animatedly about the layout of her next cookery book and her plans to open a second branch of her café bakery, sending her details of properties he’s found on the internet. She feels his helplessness – the tightened lips and weary exhalations signalling his irritation. He wants things back the way they were, yet he has no idea how to make it happen. She is the one who always smooths out the problems, the one who mends the broken things. But she can’t mend this. Right now she can’t even think straight. Using the search for new premises as an excuse to detach herself from the rhythms and demands of her own life, she spends hour after hour driving through the streets of London, losing herself in the everyday comings and goings of others. Somehow, catching the swish of a curtain or the slam of a front door, slowing her car in an unfamiliar side road to accommodate someone else’s drop-off or pick-up or hurried trip to the corner shop, helps to soothe the turmoil in her head and dilute the fear and anger corroding every cell of her being.

In the evenings she and Tom avoid all mention of Alicia and her threats, although once when Tom thinks she’s downstairs, she hears him on the phone.

‘It’s the powerlessness, Geoff, not knowing if the little bitch is bluffing … Christ, I don’t know how much longer I can take it …’

There he is, the father of her child, contrite and attentive as they arrive at the launch of her new cookbook, smiling as she mentions him in the speech she wrote before she went to New York and hasn’t had the heart to change. She even reads out the line where she thanks him for just being there because she couldn’t do any of the things she does without his love and support. His smile doesn’t falter when every face in the room swings round to see the husband of ‘adorable queen of the kitchen’, Gracie Dwyer; a hundred pairs of eyes taking in his appealing long-limbed slouch, the rumpled hair, the open-necked shirt gleaming white against skin the colour of perfect toast. She can almost hear the sighs of approval. Afterwards she bears it stiffly as they pose for the photographers – the beautiful couple with the happy wholesome life – he with one hand pulling her close, the other holding up a copy of her book. This is the shot they’ll use, she thinks as the lights flash. If the intern goes to the papers, this is the picture they’ll plaster all over the tabloids.

In the taxi home she sits forward, hanging onto the strap to stop anything of her body brushing Tom’s, but there’s hope in his eyes as they walk into the house, as if the pretence of tonight has become reality. She stops the hand he lifts to caress her cheek, moves it aside and hurries to the kitchen to fill the kettle. ‘Tea?’

‘No thanks.’ Tom pours himself a whisky and sprawls in a chair a little drunk, grunting as he picks up the papers on the table. He takes a moment to register that they’re property brochures: pubs, restaurants, shops. He flips through them. ‘Christ, have you seen the rents on these places?’

‘You can throw them away. I’ve found somewhere.’

He looks up, hurt. ‘You never said.’

She stirs the teapot, staring into the steam.

‘Are you going to show me?’

She doesn’t respond.

‘Come on, Gracie.’

She opens her handbag. Hesitates for a moment then hands him a folded sheet. He shakes open the details of a seventies pub in Battersea – stained red brick, peeling green paintwork and tinted glass. ‘You’re kidding. It’s ugly, overpriced and way too big.’

‘I need space.’

‘Not this much.’

Gracie eyes him uneasily. ‘It’s going to be more than a café bakery. I’m going to have a cook shop, serve a bistro menu in the evenings and run cookery workshops upstairs. Kelvin’s developing a spin-off series built around the courses.’

‘When did you come up with all this?’ That hurt face again.

‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I’ve been back from the States.’

‘And what? You weren’t even going to consult me?’ He flings the brochure across the table. ‘This is what I do, Gracie! What I know about!’ He swallows and softens his voice. ‘You need a building with character, something distinctive that will reflect you as well as your food, like the amazing old chapel this new French client wants me to convert into a restaurant. Why don’t you come and have a look at it, get some inspiration?’

Her eyes dart away from him.

‘Don’t do this, Gracie. Don’t shut me out.’

A silence grows between them, barely dented by her agonised whisper. ‘How can I make any plans that depend on you?’

‘Fuck!’ He mouths the word, and claws back his hair. ‘So what are you saying? That I’m not part of your future?’

‘I don’t know, Tom. Sometimes I look at you and I catch myself seeing the man I love, then I realise he doesn’t exist.’

‘What can I do? Just tell me what I can do.’

‘Why are you asking me? I didn’t make this mess.’ She puts down her mug and moves to the door. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘Gracie, please—’ He lurches after her.

She turns on the landing. ‘Shh. You’ll wake Elsie.’

He lowers his voice. ‘The new café is something we can build together. You and me.’

‘You destroyed what we built together, Tom. Have you even thought what it will do to Elsie when that girl’s tacky revelations are splashed all over the papers? She’s five years old for God’s sake! And what about me? I can cope with the sniggering and the pity but every single penny I put into paying off the crippling mortgage on this house depends on the way people see me – happy, wholesome Gracie. How’s that going to work when they find out my husband can’t keep his dick in his pants?’ She closes the bedroom door and leans against the wall, biting back her tears as his footsteps fade away down the landing.

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‘OK, Gracie. Let’s go again. Just hold the bowl a bit higher when you show us the chillies.’

She pouts for Emma’s waving wand of lip-gloss and swings into action. This is how I get through this, Gracie thinks while her hands move deftly over the bowls and pans on the countertop. I chop and dice and stir for the cameras and pretend that everything is fine, that I sleep at night, that this suffocating sense of loss is something I can bear.

The running order is full – black noodles with prawns, then her super quick fig and blueberry tarts, a chat on the sofa with specialist herb grower Akshay Kumar, tips for healthy packed lunches that kids will actually eat and, for the leftovers slot, her new garden pie, adapted from a family recipe sent in by a viewer. She spears a prawn, bites through the spicy pink flesh and smiles at the camera.

‘Cut!’ The floor manager gives her a thumbs-up, calls a ten-minute break and stands back to let a flurry of assistants swoop in to reset the counter. Emma hands her a mug of coffee. ‘You all right?’

‘Bit tired.’ Gracie slips off to the loo and locks herself in a cubicle. She presses her forehead against the tiles and spends the first five minutes of the break sobbing quietly, imagining the worst, the second five patching up her makeup and assuring herself that the worst can’t happen. She won’t let it. She twists a strand of hair back into the soft knot on top of her head, flicks her fingers through her fringe and gives her cheeks a savage prod. She’s nearly thirty-six for heaven’s sake and her face still has an open, almost childlike quality which she tempers for the cameras with sweeps of black eyeliner and slashes of crimson lipstick. Her height doesn’t help. At five foot four she’s used to people blinking when they meet her. ‘Gosh, you look so much taller on TV.’

So different from Louise’s fair, willowy elegance and the pert freckled features of that scheming little cow Alicia Sandelson. She rocks forward, closing her eyes. Like a fool she’d looked Alicia up on Facebook and now that hiss of a girl has a face – a milk-skinned, pink-lipped, heart-shaped face with a halo of pale curls. She’s smart too – Oxford and an internship at ACP. But it’s not the endless posts charting her glittering time at university or the photos of her partying in skinny jeans and halter tops that flicker through Gracie’s head on an unstoppable loop, it’s the shot of her lying on a beach in a white bikini. Not because Alicia looks particularly pretty in it. She doesn’t. And not because her body is anything special, it’s angular and streaked with sunburn across the chest and shoulders. It’s the unshakeable self-confidence in her eyes that spreads hurt through Gracie’s body. This is a girl who has no fear of failure, a twenty-two year old who functions without doubt.

She pictures Alicia sitting up pale and freckled against her own freshly laundered pillows, those small nubby breasts flushing pink with indignation as she threatens to tell the world that Gracie Dwyer’s husband lured her into bed with promises of future employment and long-term emotional commitment.

She appears back on set, moving stiffly across the studio floor as if she’s carrying a brimming pan. She reaches the safety of the counter and focuses on the flour drifting through her fingers, ghosting the sides of the glass bowl. This is how I survive. She pricks and peels and slices and sprinkles and listens to the light-hearted voice that flows from her lips extolling the virtues of unsalted butter and unbleached flour. But her heart is not light. Not light at all and her mind is spinning and spinning and spinning.