An audio book.
It's 1999. Jess and Ben have a daughter, Beth (5), who dies in an accident at school where Simon is the head, his wife Louise is a teacher, and Cara their daughter attends. Jess and the older Simon had an affair while they were both married years before, neither knowing the other was married. Jess had been 19 and her mother had just killed herself. Jess had been thinking of leaving Ben but he and his family had been a great comfort. Just before the accident Simon tells Jess that he's sure Beth is his child (she had his looks and mannerisms). After, Simon tells Louise about the affair.
The day after the funeral, Louise visits Jess. She doesn't believe that it's a coincidence that Cara and Beth ended up at the same school. She threatens Jess with a knife, says that she must tell Simon she never loved him and must leave town, otherwise Ben will be told. Jess decides to leave.
17 years later, Jess is married to Ed and has a 2 y.o. son James. They're house-hunting. The house they visit belongs to Simon and Louise, who moved to the town when Jess did, about 9 years before. Louise can't believe it's a coincidence. Simon visits Jess after, saying that Cara has left home, Louise is an alcoholic, and he's divorcing her. Jess tells him about the knife incident. Simon wants to know if she ever really loved him.
Next day Louise dies - a side-effect of her attempt to stop boozing, apparently. Simon sells up.
Jess and Ed have an au-pair, Sandrine. Jess's friend Natalie is against young girls having affairs with married men. Natalie overhears Jess complaining about her and ends their friendship, telling others about Jess. Things in their house are tampered with. Ed says that on the night that Louise died he'd asked a heavy to go to her house and warn her away from Jess (subsequently Ed discovers that the heavy never went).
Jess is drugged, tied up and held at knife-point by Sandrine - who is actually Cara. She says that Simon has been passively obsessed by Jess, cyberstalking her, neglecting Cara. Cara's mother told her that Cara had been told to push Beth. Cara summons Simon. He arrives. In a tussle he's knifed. While he's dying he says he wants Jess to say that it wasn't Cara's fault. In an epilogue Cara is in recovery and asks Jess for forgiveness. She doesn't think she pushed Beth after all. Meanwhile, Ben has found out that Beth was likely not to be his child.
Clunky plotting - the Natalie sub-plot is unconvincing; Simon goes to such great lengths to achieve so little; would Ed really hire a thug? Would the thug bother meeting Ed? I can believe that Jess would deliver a long, detailed Jess's debrief to her sister Laurel, but something's wrong with the novel's structure if the reader needs to be reminded of all this.
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