Copycat: The unputdownable new thriller from the bestselling author of After Anna. Alex Lake

       2

      She could not believe what she saw.

      The next post was a photo of her and Ben on a date a few weeks earlier at a Japanese restaurant. They were sharing a sushi boat and a bottle of white wine; the photo had been taken from behind Ben and she was listening to him, her right hand resting on her glass. The caption read:

      Date night with my wonderful husband. We need to do this more often!

      It was, she realized, exactly the sort of banal post she would have written.

      Except she hadn’t. Someone else had. And they had done more, many more.

      A photo of her in a Greek wine bar in Portland with Toni and Anne, her two best college friends, on a night out in early spring. Caption: Girls night! Yay! A photo of her and Jean, a teaching assistant in the local kindergarten who Sarah had known all her life, after a 10k race they’d run in April. It had rained nonstop throughout, an old-fashioned downpour, and they were dripping wet, and grinning. Caption: Bit rainy but no problem. My delightful British husband said before we set off ‘Nothing to worry about. This is just drizzle back home.’ He then proceeded to pull out his golf umbrella, hand warmers and flask of hot tea.

      Ben had said those very words, then waited at the finish line under his umbrella, sipping his drink.

      Holy shit. What was this? What was this and who had done it?

      It got worse.

      A photo of Faye’s pre-school production of The Giant Turnip, Faye at the left of the stage dressed as a carrot.

      A photo of the kids building a snowman on the town square.

      A photo of Sarah sipping hot chocolate in the Little Cat Café, a sheaf of papers on the table in front of her. She’d been researching an article and had gone to the café to arrange her thoughts.

      A photo, from February, of her new kitchen, installed over the winter months.

      Caption: Finished! I love this!

      A photo which had been taken inside her house.

      The air-conditioning in the car was now fully up and running, cold air flowing from the vents and washing over her, but she barely noticed it. She had goose pimples up and down her arms and legs, but it was not the cold air raising them. It was not the cold air chilling her.

      It was the photos. Of her, of Ben, of her house.

      Of her kids.

      Who was doing this? It had to be someone who was at all these places, someone who was at the beach yesterday and out on date nights with her and there when she was with her girlfriends and at Faye’s pre-school performances.

      There was no one. Not even Ben.

      And why? Was it some kind of a joke? Maybe all her friends were in on it – which would explain how they had so many photos – but why? What did they get from it? And why do it for six months without telling her? Why do it at all?

      It made no sense.

      Worse, she thought, a cruel trick by my friends is the best explanation I can hope for. I have no idea what the alternatives are, but I bet none of them are good.

      She looked back down at her phone and scrolled through the photos. This was not her friends. A joke at her expense – perhaps a fake Facebook account in her name in which she made off-color jokes or revealing admissions about her sex life – was just about possible. Toni had been a bit of a prankster in college – calling for pizzas for other people’s houses, that kind of thing – and, although she had mostly grown out of it, she still retained part of her juvenile nature. She always would. It was in her blood. Her father and two elder brothers never stopped playing tricks on each other, Toni and her long-suffering mom. The first time Sarah had stayed at their house on Cape Cod, in the summer of their freshman year in college, Marty, Toni’s dad, had made boiled eggs for breakfast, serving them in dainty porcelain egg cups with neatly sliced toast glistening with butter besides them.

      Eat, he said. It’s my specialty.

      Boiled eggs aren’t much of a specialty, Dad, Toni replied, still sleepy.

      These I call Marty’s Boiled Eggs Surprise, he said. Dig in.

      Sarah tapped the shell with her spoon. It cracked and she pulled it away. For a second she didn’t understand, then she looked up at Marty – he insisted she call him Marty and not Mr Gorchoff, which made her feel grown up and a bit uncomfortable at the same time – and told him the egg was empty. It was a hollow shell.

      That’s the surprise! he said. Your egg’s not there.

      He passed her a mug of coffee. She took a sip, and then another – it was a wonderful, heady brew – then glimpsed a sudden blaze of color among the brown, muddy coffee, which disappeared when she held the coffee mug upright.

      She tilted it again, and there it was.

      An egg yolk.

      Mr Gor— Marty, she said. There’s an egg in there!

      That’s the other part of the surprise, he said. But don’t worry! They’re organic!

      She had spent the rest of the weekend in terror of the next little ‘surprise’, but mercifully she had been left alone. Toni, however, had grown up being constantly subjected to pranks which were a touch cruel and more than a touch irresponsible – so it was not impossible she would have set up a fake Facebook account in her friend’s name.

      But not one with Sarah’s kids on it.

      Like most of her mom friends, Sarah was a little tentative about putting photos of her children up on the Internet, whatever Facebook said about privacy, so she restricted access to her account to only her friends, and then she was careful about what she put up there.

      But this account was public. These photos were there for all the world to see. And even Toni would not have gone this far in the service of some prank.

      Which left who? Ben? He’d have access to the photos – he could get them from her phone – but she couldn’t imagine him doing it. He’d have to have set it up on his work computer and then made sure she never saw any of the notifications and emails that would come in. She often used his phone, and – she wasn’t proud of this, but it was true nonetheless – gave his emails and text messages a quick scan. They were reassuringly boring. Stuff from his colleagues about operating committee presentations and legal reviews and seeking board approval and texts from his friends about where to watch the game and whether they had a pass from the wife to go out.

      No, if it was Ben, he would have had to employ a level of deception she did not think he had in him, not least because his utter cluelessness about how computers worked would have to be a long-standing deception requiring a level of acting talent she was pretty sure was beyond him.

      Pretty sure. But you never really knew. You heard of stranger things in marriages.

      She shook her head and dismissed the thought. There was no way this was Ben.

      But then who? Who the fuck was doing this?