I Know Who You Are: A Novel

The morning after reporting Ben missing, Aimee goes for a run, passing spots from their first date, and feels sad that he didn’t want children. When she stops at the coffee shop for a latte, her card is declined.

An ATM also rejects the transaction. On the phone, a bank representative tells her that someone emptied more than £10,000 from their joint account and closed it the previous day. Bank records show that Aimee authorized the closure in person, a claim she can’t reconcile with her memory.

Detective Inspector Alex Croft and Detective Sergeant Wakely arrive to investigate Ben’s disappearance. Aimee gives her account but omits the fight, instead mentioning a past stalker and the emptied bank account. While searching the house, Croft notes a broken bolt on the bedroom door. She asks for a recent photo of Ben, but Aimee can’t find one.

She then discovers that both their passports are missing. As the detectives leave with Ben’s phone and wallet, Aimee feels their suspicion and admits to herself that she has killed someone before.

In Galway in 1987, a young girl named Ciara watches her father force her older brother to kill their pet chicken with an axe. When the boy hesitates, his father hits him. Later, when Ciara tries to comfort her brother, he shoves her, accusing her of killing their mother (who died in childbirth).

He taunts Ciara about the red shoes she wants for her birthday, which the family can’t afford, and threatens her with the bloody axe. Ciara runs away in fear.

Late for her final day of shooting at Pinewood Studios, Aimee learns from her costar, Jack Anderson, that a reporter is in her dressing room. The reporter, Jennifer Jones, who has written harsh coverage of Aimee before, begins to probe Aimee’s personal life. Aimee is glad when she’s called to the set, cutting the interview short.

After filming, Aimee receives a message from her agent, Tony, who warns her not to speak to the press and confirms that he didn’t arrange an interview. Jennifer’s unauthorized access unsettles Aimee.

Upset after the confrontation with her brother, Ciara sits, crying, outside a shop and notices that the red shoes are gone from the window. A young woman approaches, introduces herself as Maggie, and comforts Ciara, earning her trust.

Maggie offers to help her get home. Though Ciara knows home is in the other direction, she takes Maggie’s hand and walks off with her, marking the start of her abduction.

On the set, Aimee and Jack perform an intense romantic scene for their film, Sometimes I Kill. The sequence moves from a restaurant to an elevator, ending in a hotel room, where the characters kiss before the director calls cut. The day’s work mirrors Aimee’s chaotic private life.

Maggie takes Ciara to a holiday cottage, distracting her with television and cake. She gives Ciara milk that tastes chalky and pretends to phone her father, returning to say that he agreed she could stay for a few days.

Ciara grows drowsy from the milk but is clearheaded enough to know that Maggie is lying, as her family has no telephone.

Aimee returns home and senses someone watching her. She closes the curtains and thinks about a stalker from two years ago who sent menacing postcards and once appeared across the street dressed just like her. She also recalls a childhood trauma that she had pretended to forget after a diagnosis of transient global amnesia.

Ciara wakes in the back of Maggie’s car, realizing that they’ve traveled far from home. Maggie tells her to go back to sleep, promising a surprise. Ciara pretends to sleep, now understanding that she has been taken.

Unable to find a recent photo of Ben for the police, Aimee searches the attic. The space is bare except for a single shoebox. She opens it and recoils when she sees its contents. She carries the box downstairs and hides it in her wardrobe without examining it further, convinced that she may not know her husband as well as she thought.

Maggie arrives in Essex and leads the sleepy Ciara into a flat where a man with a gold tooth waits. He introduces himself as John Sinclair, her new father. Ciara screams as Maggie hands her over to John.

Detectives Croft and Wakely are waiting for Aimee when she returns from her run. Croft shows Aimee restaurant CCTV footage of her slapping Ben. Aimee admits that it happened, but calls it a one-time event. The detectives take her laptop to investigate the stalker, and they search Ben’s car. The boot (trunk) is empty, but Croft points out a discrepancy between a recent fuel receipt and the nearly empty petrol gauge.

In the Essex flat, the terrified Ciara wets herself. Maggie slaps her, roughly bathes her, and hacks off her hair. Maggie hands her pajamas embroidered with the name Aimee and declares that this is the girl’s new name, threatening punishment if she uses her old one.

Aimee retrieves the shoebox from her wardrobe and lays out its contents: more than 50 vintage postcards, each threatening that the sender knows her identity. Unsure why Ben kept them, she slides the box under her bed. In the kitchen, she finds two empty lighter gel bottles in the bin.

Days later, the girl, now Aimee, wakes and notices bars on her bedroom window. Maggie dismisses them as protection. She brings Aimee into bed with John, and they eat buttered digestive biscuits for breakfast. Maggie tells the child to call her Mum.

On her final day of filming, Aimee reads a profile of a rival actress, Alicia White, and notices that Alicia uses the shade of red Chanel lipstick that Aimee recently found under her bed, hardening her suspicion that Ben was having an affair.

Detectives Croft and Wakely arrive on the set. Croft shows Aimee grainy petrol station CCTV of a woman resembling her buying lighter gel with Ben’s card. Aimee denies it’s her and suggests that her stalker, Maggie O’Neil, made the purchase. She then tells the detectives that Maggie is dead.

Maggie takes Aimee to the bookmaker’s (betting) shop beneath the flat, explaining that they sell dreams that never come true. Aimee asks if she can go home for her birthday in September. Maggie tells her that this is her home now and that her birthday is in April, stripping away the last piece of her old identity.