Who Are You? Read Online Free

Christmas. Let’s put the heating on – and don’t tell Daddy, OK?’
    Ben switches the television on and Juliet pours him a glass of milk and cuts, quarters and cores an apple for him. She delivers both the glass and the apple to Ben on the sofa and, satisfied that he’ll be content for ten minutes or so, she fires up her laptop. She types in her password, navigates to her favourite support group and scans through the new messages to see if there are any comments or threads she wants to contribute to. She’d started looking into the chat room culture as a way to fill in the long evenings when Alex was away, a sort of harmless curiosity to know what they were all about. She soon discovered that there was an enormous cocktail-style list of tastes and flavours, ranging from the straightforward bored girl looking for clean friendship, to hot woman wanting to meet scorching man for dirty playtimes. You could visit these rooms as a guest, like an anonymous voyeur just waiting and watching to see what went on. If you wanted to visit any of the interesting-sounding rooms, though, you had to sign in with a name. Juliet had bided her time before deciding to take the plunge, because once she did she had no way of knowing what kind of Pandora’s box she might be opening up. But as long as she was careful not to give anything away about her real identity or where she lived, she could adopt any persona she wanted.
    There are about four or five sites that she visits regularly, and then there are the other sites that she uses for research purposes. Google really is the most amazing search engine. She can type in any phrase, all the stuff that she can’t ask anyone else, and there’ll be answers, lots of them. She can type in Alex’s behaviour, his character traits, her suspicions about what’s actually wrong with him. God, the hours she’s spent, sometimes all through the night, just scrolling through stuff and thinking she can’t quite believe what she’s reading. Like it’s so Alex. These people are writing about her husband.
    She’s made connections with people who are going through similar things and some of them are even becoming friends, of sorts. And the funny thing is that she finds it a lot easier to be open with them, online, than she could ever be with ‘real’ people. She doesn’t know their names. They all adopt aliases so that they can’t be tracked down. Juliet has called herself Sparrowhawk because it’s a bird that is small but nonetheless feisty and not to be messed with. People have asked her – people in the support groups, that is – why she doesn’t just leave Alex, but it’s not as simple as that, and she can’t really tell them why. That would be too dangerous because you never really know who these people are. It’s funny, but for all she knows the woman that she’s confided in so openly recently could be a man, or some kind of pervert. She could be being groomed. She’s read all about that too, people pretending to be someone they’re not. Apparently they’re called sock puppets. They can lurk in chat rooms and cause trouble by bullying people, or inventing stuff … like they’re suffering from a terminal illness; they’re weird attention seekers. But she’s no ingénue. She’s not stupid, even if Alex thinks she is, which is sometimes no bad thing.
    There have been lots of really interesting books suggested by the groups, and since she got herself a Kindle she’s been able to surreptitiously read loads about men like Alex. Inside the Minds of Controlling Men … Why does He Do That … How to Break the Cycle of Manipulation and Regain Control of Your Life … Men Who Hate Women & the Women Who Love Them … The Devil You Know … Most of them have given her some insight into the way Alex behaves. But with Alex there’s such a municipal- dump-sized heap of problems festering and eating away at him that it’s going to take more than a Kindle and a catalogue of self- help books to