Copyright

Certain details in this book, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect those involved.

HarperElement

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperElement 2016

FIRST EDITION

© Adele Bellis 2016

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Front cover portrait © Johnny Ring; newspaper headlines © News Syndication

A catalogue record of this book is

available from the British Library

Adele Bellis asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Source ISBN: 9780008182090

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008182083

Version: 2016-09-14

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

1 Intensity

2 Control

3 Jealousy

4 Isolation

5 Criticism

6 Blame

7 Sabotage

8 Anger

9 Hostage

10 Revenge

11 The Attack

12 The Hospital

13 The Recovery

14 The Court Case

15 A Real Future

Acknowledgements

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

About the Publisher

Prologue

There was smoke, I remember that. As I ran into the road, my body consumed by pain, my flesh, my hair, my clothes were actually smoking. The rest of it still comes to me in flashes … The eyes of my assailant, a look of pure evil in those deep, dark pupils buried between his hoody and the black scarf covering his mouth and nose.

I can still remember those first horrifying split seconds, that exact moment when I realised that the liquid that was dripping down my hair and through my skin wasn’t water, but something much, much worse. And by the time my brain had scrambled enough sense to find a name for it – acid – every nerve in my body was screaming in pain.

I remember the old woman who I ran to. Moments before, she had just been any other person waiting for a bus and she could now have been my saviour. Except that when I grabbed her hands, pleading – begging – for her to help me, she looked down at her own flesh where the acid from my skin had seeped into hers and she cried out terrified as she watched her own flesh disappear.

I remember screaming for water.

I remember running into the road, weaving among the traffic, trying to get away from myself.

I remember feeling my ear melting from my face. I remember the sense of it shrinking and shrivelling on the side of my head. And the smell, I remember the smell, but I couldn’t describe it here on these pages. The smell of your own face melting is not something anyone should ever have to attempt to conjure up in their mind. Not that part of an act of pure evil.

Yet among all that pain, that searing, scorching-level pain, I knew exactly who was responsible. My brain cut through that raging heat, the white fire that seemed to engulf every nerve in my body and reminded me of one name.

I remember that name more than anything.

I was struggling so hard to survive, just to live, not to melt away, although that’s what I was doing in that moment; running like a wild woman into the road, seeing the horrified faces of strangers who had stopped to help and now ran from me to save their own skin. Literally.

But say I’d been able to pause that scene. Say I could have stopped it there and then, just for a minute, just for a second, I could have had one logical thought that wasn’t consumed by pain. I’ve no doubt as to what it would have been. I would have thought: how did our love come to this?

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