I am cooking spaghetti, his favourite, while he plays in the garden. But when I look up, he’s gone. I call the police, my hands shaking so much that I hit the wrong digits twice. "My son is missing." When the police turn up, I’m trapped in the web of my lies. I have hidden the truth from eight-year-old Riley, my little boy who loves climbing trees and always has scraped knees. I have hidden my secret from everyone.

You’d never know what secrets the house on Hogarth Street holds - what’s happening, right this second, behind closed doors. An emerald-green front lawn. Perfectly trimmed hedging. An ivy-covered front gate and the scent of honeysuckle in the air. In the yard, two scooters lie on the grass. One blue, one pink, belonging to five-year-old twins.

In the middle of the night, Claire wakes up to discover that her beloved daughter, Julia, is dead - and life, as she knows it, is over. Searching for answers, Claire stumbles upon a pile of letters, hidden under Julia’s bed in an old, battered shoebox, and feels closer to her daughter than ever before. They tell her that Julia was happy, that she was thriving at university, that she was in love. But as the letters go on, Claire starts to feel uneasy at something hidden between the lines. Even as she grieves, she must prepare to face a shocking discovery. 

Her chest tightens, her heart speeding up. The kitchen is chaos. She steps on something hard, and looks down. Toy dinosaurs are scattered everywhere. But her son is nowhere–her baby boy is gone.

It’s the phone call every mother dreads. I’m climbing into the car after a trip to the grocery store. As the engine starts, my phone rings. It’s my stepdaughter, Shelby, who is babysitting my three-year-old Millie. "I only went upstairs for a second," she says through her sobs. "She’s gone." When the police turn up, Shelby’s story starts to unravel. What is she hiding? Then I get a message saying, "Your husband is not who you think he is." Suddenly, my family feel like strangers. Everyone has a secret - even me.