An audio book.
Leo and Emma take turns at narrating. She is an expert on the biology of tidal zones. She presented 2 BBC series but was strangely dumped by the BBC and her agent Mags. She lectures. He writes obits for a paper. They have a 3 year-old daughter Ruby (IVF). Emma had cancer 4 years before. It went and came back, so she had chemo. She’s clear again. As therapy he writes her obit.
With the first diagnosis she'd contacted an old flame. Her best friend from uni, Jill, knows this. Leo discovers that she had to drop out of uni for a while. Her parents both died before she was 19. On the day he’d brought her to see his parents for the first time he’d found out he was adopted. He then found that his natural mother had died 2 years before. He didn’t speak to his parents for years.
As a student, Emma found a crab on a beach and left it there. She described it to people who said it was a new species. She goes back to look for it sometimes.
Emma takes Ruby away with her for a conference. She meets up with Jeremy Rothschild (who has a son, Charlie, at MIT), and Ruby sees him (my guess is that Ruby will later see Jeremy on TV while Leo is there). His wife Janis has disappeared, leaving Emma a letter. We learn that Emma and Janis had known each other, and that Janis was with Emma when the crab was seen! Meanwhile Leo contacts Emma's BBC ex-colleague, discovers that she used to meet Jeremy Rothschild, a TV interviewer. Emma had broken contact with her agent, not the other way round. Emma had also changed her name and has a criminal record for stalking. Leo reads a txt from Emma to Jeremy saying "You are the father of my child". Leo thinks this refers to Ruby. We know that Jeremy has a child.
Emma knows that Leo is close to uncovering her lies. We learn now that she doesn't love Leo! (for a moment, anyway)
We go back to when Emma was a 2nd year. She had a one night stand, got pregnant, and managed to contact a relative of the man. It was Jeremy, who offered to help financially or otherwise. He told her that he and her wife had wanted to adopt. Emma decided to accept the option. Her 80 y.o. grandmother had other plans. After the birth she goes mad - saying that the baby is a female (though it isn't - why didn't those around her react more quickly to this?) and trying to smother the baby. Fearing she'd kill her own baby, she gives the child away and is later caught stalking Janis. We're given some of the story from Janis's PoV via a diary.
Jemery tells Leo the story.
Jill arranges a meeting between Emma and Charlie. Charlie says that he read Janis's diaries where it said that Janis realised after some years that Emma had been playing Peek-a-boo with Charlie, not trying to smother him. He confronted her about it which is maybe why she's disappeared.
Emma has a hunch about where Janis is. She and Charlie go on a long, speculative drive there. In an epilogue, 6 months later, she and Charlie are in frequent contact. Leo has begun to trust her again.
- Jill feels guilty for not looking after Emma on the night she got pregnant
- Emma feels guilty for trying to kill Charlie (she couldn't recall the incident accurately) and for lying to Leo
- Charlie feels guilty for Janis's disappearance
- Janis feels guilty about accusing Emma in order to have the baby
Leo describes Emma as brilliant, and "the funniest person I know". There's little to support his opinion - even among his work colleagues there's strong competition. The characterisation seems overly dictated by the plot rather than by psychology, and the way readers are misled is sometimes a little unfair I think, going beyond "unreliable narrator". The writer/narrator soon runs out of ways to say that tears appeared.
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