Chapter 161

‘After he left, my mother's life went very much downhill.’

She lapsed into silence then, because she did not want to tell him how grim it had been. The sheltered housing, the stints in various homeless shelters, the weeks when she’d been taken away from her mother and sent from one foster home to another Some of them had been good, some of them mediocre, and some of them had been very bad. But always, in the end, she’d been brought back to her mother to try again, having promised she’d stay clean, and for a few days, sometimes a few weeks, she had.

Life during those periods had been normal, if fragile, and sometimes Lucette would begin to believe it was going to be okay this time. Then she’d come home from school to find her mother strung out, or manically high, the promises all broken, and the whole cycle would start once more.

Until Annelise But she really didn’t want to talk about Annelise.

‘Lucette ?’ Ariston prompted Ariston softly. "Tell me more. If she couldn’t care for you,