An audio book.
Prologue - Someone wraps a gift for Rachel, anticipating Rachel's reaction on opening it.
Rachel, 47, and husband Robert drive daughter Dylan to Birmingham to start university. Dylan had anorexia 2 years before. Rachel feels the loss. She's not worked since Dylan's birth (she'd worked in published). She's begun to care for an old couple next door. Robert has a well paid job (high-end property - his own business) and has to travel. While he goes to Paris Rachel attends a book launch and gets a job straight away. She also meets her boyfriend, Chris, from university and sleeps with him.
She feels guilty and wants to make it a one-night stand. She finds a carer, Nathan, for the neighbours. She's cyberstalked - phone-calls, texts and facebook activity. Faked nude pictures are sent to her boss. She gets home one day to find a heart cooking in the oven.
A trip back to her mother in Belfast brings back memories. She struggled to get a II.ii at Durham. Chris cheated just got a pass. He had asked her to marry him. She'd said no, discovered she was pregnant, and had an abortion. This latter piece of information is revealed belatedly, no reason given for the delay.
She discovers that Nathan and Dylan are a pair, and that Chris was imprisoned for GBH. A possible secret-service agent contacts her to say that Robert's Russian clients use him to launder money.
Robert surprises her by buying them a 15-bedroom house. The female old neighbour dies. Chris turns up at a uni reunion which Rachel also attends.
Circumstantial evidence convinces her that Nathan was the stalker. She tells Rachel and Dylan about it.
Robert's brother appears with his family. It's unclear why. Rachel sees her best friend Serena flirt with Robert, who resists. Robert tell Rachel that he owes the Russians money. Rachel apologises to Chris for messing his life up - he'd spent so long writing her final essay for her that he didn't have time to write his own. This latter piece of information is revealed belatedly, no reason given for the delay.
She discovers that Robert's the stalker, that the old neighbour died when she caught him trying to frame Nathan. He locks him in a room and lights a fire. In the prologue months later we learn that Robert's been sentenced, that Rachel plans to marry Chris and get his novel published.
Issues that concern her (Dylan's absence, the stalking) disappear from the narrative for weeks. When Dylan returns, Rachel doesn't seem interested.
Some of the phrasing - "I thought to myself", "I screamed out loud", "I had lied [in bed]", "I watched his Adam's apple rise up and down in his throat" - seems questionable. Emotions are expressed via feeling in her chest and stomach.
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