“You’re overreacting,” Rhys snaps. “It didn’t do her any harm.”
“How do you know? It could be in her system—a buildup, from over the years, and one day, it’ll come out—”
Rhys gives a bark of laughter. “Sixteen years later?”
Felicia claps her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.
“They’re talking about us,” Tabby whispers.
“One of us,” Felicia adds darkly.
“And now you’re risking the lives of those two precious babies. It’s beyond awful. I shall tell Blythe. I can’t keep it from her.”
Felicia is lost. What has Dad done, and what does it have to do with Woody and Hester?
“Oh no, you’re not pinning that on me,” Rhys says. “That’s all Jonty’s doing.”
“You gave him the sleeping pills! You gave him the idea!”
“I simply told him it had worked for us when Felicia was a nightmare going down—”
“Foryou, Rhys! You drugged my baby for three years without my knowledge. You could have killed her!”
Tabby turns to Felicia in horror, but Felicia’s eyes have filled with tears, and she runs up the stairs. Her mother’s affair with Jonty is the least of her worries now that she knows what Rhys has done. It’s child abuse, that’s what it is.
Her dad is a monster.
Forty-Four
January 8
Ffion
“Still think she did it?” Ffion turns to Leo as they pull out of Ceri’s street.
“I don’t know what to think anymore.” Leo maneuvers slowly through the snow. The weather’s worsening. As they drive through Cwm Coed, flurries of white whirl against the windshield, bright white against the darkening sky.
Burned from Yasmin Lloyd’s fruitless hours in custody, Crouch refused to allow them to hold Ceri a minute longer than they had to.
“Stick bail conditions on her and let her go,” he said, and Leo and Ffion had no choice but to comply. Ceri had arrived at the party at eight and was gone at ten thirty, when—she said—she’dhad enough of all the bullshit. They’d bailed her for two weeks: enough time to seek advice from the Crown Prosecution Service and to follow up on the lines of inquiry generated by Ceri’s interview—including the conversation she’d overheard between Huw and Steffan.
“She could have gone back to the party,” Leo says now. “She says she was tucked up in bed by eleven, but there’s no partner to corroborate that.”
“She’s never—” Ffion stops herself. She was going to say that Ceri had never had a girlfriend, thoughtlessly repeating what she’d heard others say. But isn’t that precisely what Ffion hates about Cwm Coed? The gossip that becomes folklore, the cap made to fit you so well, you wear it your whole life.
FfionWyllt.
Rhys Lloyd turned an entire generation against Ceri. Was it any wonder she felt she had to keep her love life private?
Ffion’s phone rings, and she frowns at the screen. She can count on one hand the number of times Seren has rung her. The younger girl prefers to WhatsApp and, even then, only ever when she wants something. A late pass, when Mam’s said home by nine. A lend of Ffion’s jeans.
Ffion answers. “Ti’n iawn?”
There’s no reply. Ffion moves the phone away from her ear, checking the line hasn’t dropped.
“Seren?”
She hears a jagged intake of breath: a rough, angry sob. And then, finally, Seren speaks.