The Last Lie: The must-read new thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author. Alex Lake

       Claire

      Claire Daniels stood on the tiled floor of the bathroom and stared into the mirror. She studied the face that looked back at her. She recognized every feature and freckle and contour. She had seen them a thousand times. More. Many thousands. The face belonged to her. It was utterly familiar.

      And yet, in a few minutes, she might be a totally new person.

      From time to time a person could change in an instant into someone new. It had happened to her twice: the day her mum died and the day she met Alfie. Once for bad, once for good. And today – this morning – it might be about to happen a third time.

      That first time was awful. Beyond awful. She was fourteen and had just walked in from Lacrosse practice after school. Her best friend Jodie’s mum had brought her home and on the way back she had asked if they wanted to go to a Coldplay concert, on their own. Jodie’s mum said she would drop them off and pick them up but they could watch the concert without any adults present.

      Thank you, Mrs Pierce, Claire said. That would be amazing.

      Call me Angie, Jodie’s mum said. But you need to clear it with your parents.

      Which was what Claire had been planning to do when she ran into the house. Her dad would be at work, but she could hear the television in the living room, which was where her mum would be.

      She was there, all right, slumped on the cream leather sofa in the living room. At first Claire had thought she was sleeping, but then she noticed the trickle of blood coming from her nostril and the vomit on her jeans and the glassy-eyed stare into nowhere.

      She was dead. Claire knew it as soon as she saw her, but that didn’t stop her slapping then hugging then slapping her to wake her up. What followed was a whirl she had never been able to put in order however many times she had thought about it. She’d called her dad and then it was sirens, medics, police officers. A doctor had given her something and she’d gone to bed, only to wake up the next day to the same horror.

      Her mother never gave permission for Claire to go to the Coldplay concert. She never gave permission for anything else ever again.

      Heroin, her dad told her a few days later. Her mum had overdosed, an addiction from her twenties that she’d managed to beat down had come roaring back in her forties and burned her out.

      It snuffed out Claire, too. Left her hollow. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw someone else. Someone lost, unsmiling, changed. There was a gap at the centre of her, a gap that was only filled when she met Alfie. She remembered getting home after their first date, a date that had begun as an afternoon coffee and grown into dinner and drinks and a night-time walk through central London. She’d glimpsed herself in the mirror. Something about her reflection had caught her eye and she’d paused, and looked again, and seen a new woman. Seen herself again.

      And she knew she had changed in the space of that night, had started to emerge from the hole her mum’s death had left her in.

      Started. Even after three years of marriage – three happy years – there was still something missing. And hopefully that final piece of the puzzle would be in place any minute. If it went as she hoped, she’d look in the mirror and see, once again, a new person.

      A mother.

      At least, a mother-to-be.

      A mother who would not overdose on heroin and leave her daughter alone. A mother who would love and cherish her child, her children. A mother who would heal her own wounds by making sure she didn’t inflict them on her children.

      And then she’d go and wake up her husband, the man who had made her feel warm and safe and whole from the moment they’d met and every moment since, and tell him that she was pregnant. After all these months trying, finally, they were going to be parents, going to have new titles, new roles.

      Claire and Alfie, daughter and son, wife and husband.

      Mum and dad.

      She blinked, and opened the bathroom cabinet. She took out a pregnancy test. It was the first of a packet of two. She’d bought them nine months earlier in anticipation of needing them sooner, but her period had come, on time, month after month. She and Alfie did everything right: they had sex constantly when she was ovulating, and plenty besides, but it didn’t matter. Inevitably at the appointed time she started to feel bloated and lethargic and then her period arrived.

      But not this month. This month she was two days late. Two whole days. She knew there could be many reasons why, but she didn’t care.

      She was pregnant. She felt it.

      And it was her birthday this weekend. She had drinks planned after work – it was a Friday – and then a party at her dad’s house on Saturday. It was the perfect present. It all hung together. It was too right not to be true.

      She took the test from the cardboard and sat on the toilet. She positioned it between her legs and a few seconds later a stream of warm urine ran over the white plastic. She left it there until the stream stopped and then placed it by the sink. She didn’t look at it; the line she craved could take a minute or so to show up and she wanted to give it every opportunity.

      She washed her hands, her heart racing and her stomach tight. She pictured herself walking into their bedroom and shaking Alfie awake. Telling him the news. Watching him smile. No – she stopped herself. She shouldn’t get carried away. Her dad called it the commentators’ curse: just when a commentator was saying how some football team was about to score or some player was playing well, something bad would happen.

      But this was it; she was sure of it. There’d be a line and she’d be pregnant and even if it didn’t work out, if there was a problem of some sort, she’d know she could get pregnant, and even that would be enough, would be better than the doubt and worry and anguish of wondering if it would ever happen.

      She picked up the pregnancy test. Turned it around. Let her eyes travel to the end where the little window contained—

      Nothing.

      No line. Not the faintest imprint of a line.

      She shook it. She put it down next to the sink and waited a minute or two. Then she picked it up again.

      No line.

      She pressed the pedal at the base of the bin and flipped the lid open. She looked one last time – to be sure – and then threw the test, the negative test, into the trash. She’d ask Alfie to take it out later. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want any reminder of her failure.