The Couple in the Photo, page 1
Praise for Helen Cooper
The Other Guest
“Difficult-to-put-down thriller . . . Brilliantly characterized, boldly plotted, and boasting an ending that readers will think they have figured out only to have everything turned around. The perfect vacation thriller.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“[A] strong psychological thriller . . . Credible characters enhance the suspenseful plot. Cooper remains a writer to watch.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In this captivating slow-burner, dark secrets lurk beneath a luxurious lakeside resort in Italy with mysterious connections to a handsome bartender in England. Helen Cooper deftly navigates between what seems like two completely separate narratives bundled in The Other Guest: One involves a murder hushed up by the victim’s own family, and the other involves a blossoming romance. You’ll be hooked on trying to solve this puzzle!”
—Reader’s Digest
“A luxury Italian resort with a dark side. A cast of suspicious, secretive characters. The Other Guest is an eerie and atmospheric mystery that kept me guessing from start to finish.”
—Allie Reynolds, author of Shiver
“An exquisite setting masks layers of secrets. Beautifully written, powerfully conveyed, and swirling with mysteries you’ll race to the last page to solve.”
—Megan Collins, author of The Family Plot
“Teased out against the slick and stylish backdrop of Lake Garda, The Other Guest is the perfect combination of glamour, intrigue, and sibling rivalry.”
—Polly Phillips, author of The Reunion
“A masterpiece of storytelling with twist after unguessable twist. I relished every delicious page.”
—Lucy Martin, author of Stop at Nothing
“Sinister and beautifully atmospheric, The Other Guest lures you with the promise of a luxury island before revealing its darker, claustrophobic side. I loved it.”
—L. V. Matthews, author of The Twins
The Downstairs Neighbor
“Fans of British mysteries will love this debut . . . It is difficult to put down. This is one that readers may not figure out fully, if at all, in advance of the denouement, but the author ties all the secrets together in a most satisfying reveal.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Perfect for fans of twisty plots that’ll keep you guessing.”
—Country Living
“A heart-pounding debut . . . Even avid suspense readers won’t be able to predict all the twists.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Cooper skillfully builds a house of cards, demolishes it, reshuffles the deck, and deals an even stronger hand, while keeping a few cards up her sleeve. An emotionally charged domestic-suspense debut, perfect for fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware.”
—Booklist
“A gradual unearthing of long-held secrets wrapped in a smoothly plotted page-turner.”
—Kimberly Belle, author of Stranger in the Lake and The Marriage Lie
“Powerfully displays how we often think secrets are the best way to protect those we love, but they often cause more damage than good.”
—San Francisco Book Review
“Lock your doors, close your curtains, and sink into this claustrophobic tale of families, neighbors, and buried secrets. Tense and perfectly paced, this emotionally charged novel will keep you guessing right to the very end.”
—Emma Rous, author of The Au Pair
“The unrelenting tension of this well-crafted debut kept me whizzing through the book. Loved the tension, the secrets, and the satisfying, unexpected conclusion. Recommended!”
—K. L. Slater, author of The Apartment
“An intriguing and compulsive story about family, secret pasts, and private lives. Simmering with suspense and packed with twists and tension, this expertly crafted novel kept me gripped from start to finish.”
—Holly Miller, author of The Sight of You
“Intricate . . . Readers will be kept on their toes as they are constantly handed puzzle pieces with no idea how they will all ultimately fit together. . . . I am very excited to see what Helen Cooper does next!”
—The Nerd Daily
“A twisty tale of secrets, murder, and revenge that keeps the reader on the edge of their seats throughout, with twist after twist revealed . . . Helen Cooper will be one to watch in the future.”
—Red Carpet Crash
Also by Helen Cooper
The Other Guest
The Downstairs Neighbor
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publishers Since 1838
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2023 by Helen Cooper
Published by arrangement with Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. First published in the United Kingdom in 2023.
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
Trade paperback ISBN: 9780593544907
Ebook ISBN: 9780593544914
LCCN: 2023040178
Cover design: Dominique Jones
Cover images: (beach) Levente Bodo / Moment Open / Getty Images; (couple) Casarsa / Getty Images; (trees) Vicuschka / Moment / Getty Images
Interior art by icemanphotos/Shutterstock
Book design by Ashley Tucker, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Cover
Praise for Helen Cooper
Also by Helen Cooper
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_145559228_
For Phil, for everything
Chapter One
Photos were Lucy’s thing. Not so much being in them but taking them, collecting them, looking back on them. Her phone constantly complained about maxed-out storage and she had albums crammed with printed pictures of Adam and the girls. Every social event, every holiday, she’d be reaching for her phone. Not to post the snaps on social media or perfect them with filters, but just to lock in the moments. Adam teased her about it, as did their best friends, Cora and Scott, but Lucy didn’t care. It made her happy. And if she was honest, so did their teasing.
So that was why, when a colleague started showing off her honeymoon pictures at an otherwise mundane work party, Lucy gravitated toward her. She didn’t know it would change her life, would be the difference between seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing. She was just drawn in by the blue skies flashing across her colleague’s phone.
The small group that had gathered around Ruth shuffled to make room, and Lucy drew up a seat. She loved wedding and holiday snaps in particular, even those of people she didn’t know well. She associated them with joy and sunshine, food and wine—all her favorite things. “Easily pleased,” Cora would say with a laugh when Lucy got excited about cherry ice cream on the beach or her favorite Malbec on offer in Sainsbury’s. Lucy would stick out her tongue—“We can’t all find inner peace through yoga and meditation, Cor, some of us get it from snacks and booze and box sets”—and try to persuade her friend to treat herself, too.
Now she stared at her colleague’s pictures of creamy-white sands and shimmering lagoons, and felt a familiar longing for good times, new memories, new photos in her own phone. Sometimes it was as if she couldn’t get enough, was trying to max out her life as well as her iCloud.
“It looks absolu
tely amazing, Ruth,” she said with feeling. Ruth taught history and Lucy had always thought of her as ultra-serious—unlike herself, the drama teacher with the infamously loud laugh—but seeing her in the Maldives with her new husband, glowing and relaxed, cast her in a different light. Lucy nudged her plastic chair a little closer. She wasn’t sure why these work gatherings always took place in a classroom, the buffet laid out on the scuffed desks and everybody milling awkwardly. But then, if she was honest, the only socializing she truly enjoyed these days was the evenings and weekends that she and Adam spent with Cora, Scott, and the kids. She felt a yearning whenever she was in anybody else’s company, like she wasn’t exactly where she belonged.
Her mind had started drifting, planning their next joint movie night (what film, what theme, what food?), when she saw an image in her colleague’s hand that tugged her sharply back.
“Hang on, Ruth,” Lucy said. “Could you . . . flick back to the previous picture?”
Ruth looked surprised but pleased, especially as others had started to lose interest and were chatting among themselves. “Oh, we met this other lovely couple one night while we were there . . .”
She swiped back and thrust the phone toward Lucy. The picture seemed to come slowly into focus, everything else receding. For a weird moment, Lucy felt as if she could’ve taken it herself. She’d captured Scott and Cora in that exact pose many times—arms round each other, heads angled together. At parties, at their vow renewal ceremony, outside the shared Norfolk holiday cottage on the day they’d all picked up the keys . . .
Except this picture, dated only five days ago, wasn’t of them. It was Scott on the right, with his rumpled auburn hair and photogenic features. He wore a green linen shirt with the top three buttons undone, and was smiling beneath seventies-style sunglasses even though the photo had clearly been taken at night, on what looked like a restaurant terrace jutting out over a black sea.
But the woman by his side was not Cora. It was someone Lucy had never seen before, her dark eyes shining in an aura of candlelight. Her hair was dark, too, curly and wild, whereas Cora’s was ash-blonde and poker-straight, usually tied in a high bun. This woman looked slightly older than both Cora and Scott, her face beautiful but very much lived-in, her shoulders hinting at a much sturdier frame than Cora’s petite, yoga-honed body.
Lucy could feel Ruth frowning at her in confusion. Her heart was pounding and it took her a while to speak.
“A couple?” she said. “Are you sure?”
“Ohhh yes! They even gave Martin and me a run for our money in the smoochiness stakes!” Ruth said. “We joked about that when we got chatting to them. We only saw them the once, though, which was odd, given that it was a tiny island. And a shame, too, ’cause they were great fun.”
“How . . .” Lucy’s head felt thick. “What . . . were their names?”
“Jason and Anna,” Ruth reeled off with pride. “An interesting pair! Pretty drunk that night, but then so were we!” She laughed to herself, as if at some remembered in-joke, then swiped onward, reeling through more palm trees and lapping waves while Lucy sat back in her chair with bile rising in her throat.
* * *
—
Her thoughts were a tangle by the time she got home. She walked up the overgrown path and into the usual chaos of the hall: Tilly’s purple bike on its side, blocking the way; shoes of various sizes overflowing from the rack. In her distraction, she put her foot on a tennis ball that had been abandoned in the middle of the floor and almost went flying. She snatched it up, cursing to herself, squeezing it like a stress reliever as she made her way through to the kitchen.
Adam was preparing homemade pizzas. Always their Friday-night treat, with more and more ambitious toppings each week—Lucy would joke that the only area of his life in which he took crazy risks was cooking. There was no sign of Tilly or Fran. Their green schoolbags hung from the backs of two chairs, probably harboring important letters or forgotten homework instructions that Lucy would have to sniff out later. For once, she was glad the girls weren’t in the room, rushing toward her with kisses and complaints and anecdotes from their day. She wanted to talk to Adam about the photo. All the way home, she’d been trying to think of plausible explanations. Maybe the woman was a work friend of Scott’s. He was away on business at the moment—though supposedly in Japan, not the Maldives. He organized air shows and other aerospace events all around the world and often traveled. Perhaps the Maldives was also part of this trip, and Ruth had got the wrong end of the stick about his relationship with a colleague? Maybe she’d got it wrong about the names, too?
Jason and Anna. A run for our money in the smoochiness stakes. The floor seemed to tilt beneath Lucy’s feet each time she remembered those words.
“Where are the girls?” she asked as Adam kissed her in an entirely non-smoochy way, holding flour-covered palms out to his sides. His glasses were smeared and he was wearing the floral apron Lucy had been given in a work Secret Santa two years ago and had never actually worn herself. Distractedly, and out of habit, she slipped his glasses off his face and wiped them for him on a clean corner of the apron.
“In the garden,” he said as she slid them back on, “playing some incomprehensible variation of tag with Ivy and Joe.”
Lucy stilled. “Ivy and Joe are here?”
It wouldn’t normally have come as a surprise. Most weeks, they were here more often than they weren’t. But today it sent Lucy into a mini panic. And she realized Cora and the kids hadn’t been around as much while Scott had been away, as if all their routines had been thrown out by his trip, things changing already, coming apart at the seams.
“I picked them up from school, too,” Adam said. “Cora’s got a meeting and Scott’s not back ’til later tonight. Cor should be here soon, though. I said her and the kids could join us for pizzas. I just hope I’ve not made this dough too”—he squinted at his handiwork, prodding it with his thumb—“well, doughy . . .”
Lucy stepped closer to Adam, laying a hand on his arm. “Ad, I saw something really strange today.”
“Did you?” He glanced at her, still preoccupied by the consistency of his pizza bases.
Lucy gazed through the big kitchen window at the kids playing in the garden, moving around each other in a dance of utmost familiarity and absorption. So comfortable together, so accepting of Tilly’s bossiness and Fran’s left-field imagination; Ivy’s primness and the way Joe’s voice got too loud when he was excited by a game. Lucy’s heart strained. She often worried about the day they might grow out of one another, grow out of wanting to spend so much time within their two-family unit, especially as Tilly approached secondary school and they all got taller by the week. But now a new fear overwhelmed her, one she’d never imagined having to face. What would happen if an upset as big as an affair tore their lives down the middle?
“I saw a photo,” she said breathlessly. “Of Scott in the Maldives . . . with another woman.”
Adam spluttered out a laugh that sent flour particles whirling. “What?”
His amusement was almost comforting. It spoke of how ridiculous the idea was. Lucy grasped at the hope that they would all chuckle about this misunderstanding in a few days, when everything had been cleared up and explained away.
“My colleague—you remember Ruth?” She barely paused for his response because he was terrible at remembering people and names, always marveling at how she recalled (and obsessed over) endless details of others’ lives. “Anyway, she was showing me her honeymoon photos from just last week, and there was one of a couple she met out there, and it was Scott. It was Scott even though Ruth said his name was Jason, and he was with a dark-haired woman . . .”
Lucy ran out of breath, her body prickling with heat. She was fully panicking now. Panicking that saying it out loud might make it true. Cora would be devastated. Poor Ivy and Joe. The Waughs were like family to her; that wasn’t just a cliché, just something you said. Lucy’s parents had immigrated to New Zealand sixteen years ago, and she’d moved from Nottingham to take up her first teaching job in Leicester shortly afterward. Heartsick for her mum and dad, and knowing nobody in the city, she’d got chatting to Adam at work. The friendly, slightly awkward IT guy who’d helped her sort out a recurring problem with her emails, not resting until he’d both solved it and figured out what weird combination of glitches had caused it in the first place. He’d also embarked on an unassuming mission to convince her of Leicester’s charms, telling her it was “just like Nottingham, really, but without the castle!” As if, perhaps, he’d understood Lucy’s craving for familiarity.
