Alex Piers’s wife was out. Nothing odd in that, she always was. Most mornings, virtually every night. Amy, their eight-year-old daughter, had gone to summer school. The house echoed to the sound of his shoes as he crossed the wide entrance hall and went straight into the kitchen. An empty, lonely house. He poured himself some ice-cold water from a bottle in the fridge, leaned back on the worktop and looked out through the large patio windows to the swimming pool.
He stared at the pool, his mind an empty shell. For too long he’d thought about where it had all gone wrong, how he could turn it all around, make her love him again. But he knew this would never happen. It was burned too deep. The deceit. The lies. Too much had been said to ever make it all right again.
Two weeks ago, as Amy st
