Read an extra chapter from Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell

Lisa Jewell first published Invisible Girl back in 2020, but the psychological thriller still has a hold on us. In the story, Owen Pick is a single main in his thirties who has stumbled across “incel” – involuntary celibate – culture on online chatrooms. When a young girl goes missing outside his front door, he is the prime suspect. But could his neighbour, the charismatic child psychologist Roan Fours, know more than he’s letting on?

It’s a gripping story, but its explosive finale left us with questions. That’s why we’re so excited to share the below bonus chapter that Lisa Jewell wrote for a bookseller special edition of Invisible Girl when it was first published. Warning: spoilers ahead.

The extra chapter is narrated by Alicia, the lover of child psychiatrist Roan Fours. Alicia is one of the minor characters in Invisible Girl, to whom readers quite possibly haven’t given much thought – and yet as we read this bonus chapter we realise that perhaps we should have…

Right from the start of this book, Roan Fours is a hugely ambiguous character capable of great charm and, we soon discover, dark acts aimed against women. So why was Alicia attracted to him and what does she think of their break-up?

If the function of bonus chapters is to raise questions and point us towards new and potentially chilling answers, this chapter does exactly this. Let us know what you think in the comments below…

Invisible Girl
by
Lisa Jewell

Alicia can feel it in her gut, the feeling of wrongness, that something bad is about to happen. She’s been feeling it on and off for days, the distance growing between them; feels it in the pause when he answers his phone to her, just before he says hello, in the way he keeps his chair turned to face the window in his office so she can’t wave at him when she walks past anymore.
        She’d first heard Roan’s name in the context of a gossipy exchange with a girl at the front desk during after work drinks. ‘Have you met Dr Fours yet? Roan?’
        She’d shaken her head.
        ‘Won’t be long before you do then,’ the woman had said.
        ‘What do you mean?’
        ‘I mean, you’re very attractive.’
        ‘He’s a lech, you mean?’ She pictured a large, possibly unkempt man with a gruesome twinkle in his eye. ‘Handsy?’
        ‘No. Not that. He’s charming, actually. But he does like the company of attractive women. Particularly young attractive women. Just don’t day I didn’t warn you.’
        She found herself in his company a few days later at a summer barbecue and took a keen interest in him based on the reputation the other woman had painted for him. He was not what she’d been expecting; strangely ageless with very smooth skin, luminous blue eyes and soft lashes, a shaved head, trendy reading glasses that came on and off depending on what he was doing, a sculpted Roman nose, a way of positioning himself and his long limbs that made him look as if every person he talked to was the most interesting person in the world.
        And there’s something, you see, about a man with a reputation. There shouldn’t be, but there is. It’s almost like a call to test the theory, see if it works on you the same way it works on other women, to see, maybe, if you can resist, or even perhaps be immune to it. Not to mention the possibility that the man with the reputation may not make a play for you and how that would inevitably ramp up the tension. So she watched him that afternoon, she noticed his hand on women’s elbows, around their fingers while topping up their wine glasses, the jut of his pelvis, the way he passed his hand over the dome of his head every now and then, his long fingers splayed out.
        Eventually their paths had entwined at the bar (a trestle table set up in the shade of a tree, set with upturned glasses and bottles of wine growing warm in the heat of the afternoon). He’d tipped an open bottle towards her and said, ‘Can I top you up?’
        She’d angled her glass towards him and avoided his eye.
        ‘Alicia, isn’t it?’ he said.
        She felt herself blush at the realisation that he knew who she was. ‘Yes. How do you know?’
        ‘Word gets round when someone young and brilliant arrives. All us old farts get a bit anxious. I hear you’ve been in the private sector?’
        She regaled him with a short history of her time at a clinic in Harley Street, treating the children of the rich and famous, but mainly the rich and all the while he’d looked at her, entranced, interjected at just the right moments, not once had his eyes flickered across her shoulder to see if there was someone else he might prefer to be talking to.
        His voice was soothing, deep, dark. She’d intended to play the game when she finally met the infamous Roan Fours, but within a moment she’d abandoned the rules. She didn’t care that he had a reputation, an eye for pretty girls, that he did this same act with every woman he met. For those moments, as the early summer sun dappled through the trees and onto the white gold surfaces of their warm white wine, she was captivated.
She wondered how old he was. His experience and professional standing suggested a man in his forties at the very youngest. She googled him when she got home that night and found that he was nearly fifty. She also found that he was married.
        That had taken her aback. He didn’t seem married. He didn’t wear a ring. He hadn’t mentioned kids or a lifestyle commensurate with kids or a wife. And this, she realised, was all part of the game she’d knowingly allowed herself to be sucked into.
        Their flirtation continued throughout those summer weeks. One day, standing behind the centre, backs to the wall, taking in the gentle sun, she’d said, ‘Why don’t you wear a wedding ring?’
        He’d glanced down at his bare finger as if it had never occurred to him before. Alicia had suspected a certain disingenuousness but let it pass.
        ‘Oh,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t really know. I’m just not a jewellery person.’
        ‘Very few men are jewellery people,’ she’d countered. ‘They just wear the ring because they want the world to know that they’re taken. Because they’re proud.’
        ‘Is that true?’ he’d replied, smiling lopsidedly. ‘Well, maybe I should get one then.’
        ‘I think your wife would like it if you did. Doesn’t she ever ask?’
        ‘My wife doesn’t really ask for much,’ he said. ‘She’s very easy going.’
        And there it was, she could see that in retrospect. The easy-going wife. Not the cliched wife who doesn’t understand me, but the wife who understands me so well that she lets me do as I please. She was the key that unlocked the door. If he’d painted a picture of a brittle woman waiting anxiously at home for her husband to return, she would have walked away from the thing that was unfurling between them. But the cool wife, the laidback wife, the wife who didn’t care whether her husband wore a wedding ring or not because she was too busy being self-fulfilled and, no doubt, beautiful and successful and busy to worry too much what her handsome, ring-free husband was up to. She was an easy person to hurt.

The following day they went to the pub after work. They sat in a scruffy beer garden bedecked with coloured lights on strings, burgers being flipped on the outdoor grill. The football was on a large screen, the volume turned up so loud that she needed to shout to be heard. She sat next to Roan, their legs touching underneath the table and drank a pint of cold lager that went straight to her ahead. When he suggested food she knew it was a good idea, but she also knew it was about much more than just food.
        They had noodles in a Chinese restaurant and he told her three times how pretty she looked, how beautiful her hair was, how he’d started to look for the flash of it around the corridors of the clinic. Then his hand reached across the table and touched her hair and her breath caught and she thought, yes, I want this, I want this wrong thing more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.
        They parted ways outside the tube station and she could already feel herself resisting the urge to touch him. She sat, blinded, numb, ecstatic, terrified on the tube home that night, trying to recognise the girl she saw reflected in the glass of the window opposite, the girl who was mere days away from embarking on an affair with a married man.

Like all affairs, the best bit was the first bit, the bit where he found her extraordinary, when he was obsessed with her. The adrenaline-fuelled days of clandestine meetings in empty rooms at work, the deepest darkest corners of the beer garden at the pub, shadowy tables for two at the very back of local restaurants. She invited him to her flat but he declined. Said he didn’t want to waste a precious second of his time with her sitting on tubes or in Ubers. They consummated the affair in a Best Western hotel room and that was where the rest of their affair played itself out, each time becoming more and more rushed, less and less intense, almost mechanical in many ways, a sequence of movements that seemed mainly designed to keep Roan happy, commands, demands, instructions, a tone of voice that had seemed thrilling to start with but soon came to seem uncaring.
        Roan began to remove himself quickly from the bedsheets, buttoning up his shirt on the foot of the bed, reaching for his glasses, smiling sadly as if it killed him to have to leave her. But she had started to suspect that it didn’t.

Yesterday, in a fit of the sort of insanity that can only be brought about by the fading attentions of a lover, Alicia sent Roan a Valentine’s Day card. Her fingers had gripped the edge of the envelope as it balanced on the fulcrum of the rim of the letterbox hole. She’d drawn breath and let it drop, then walked fast, really fast, as though the letterbox might explode into a thousand bright red shards in her wake.
        And now she is to meet him in a coffee shop at Baker Street tube station. She doesn’t know if he has seen the card, if this meeting is to discuss the card or to discuss something else.
        He appears a moment later and slides into the seat opposite hers.
        ‘I can’t stay long,’ he says abruptly. ‘I’ve got a lunch meeting at one.’
        She nods and says nothing.
        ‘I just wanted to say, and I think you probably know what I’m going to say, but this…it’s not…I’m not sure I can do this anymore.’
        She nods again.
        ‘You are the most incredible woman, but I…my wife. You know. The kids.’
        She blinks slowly, waiting for her next words to form. ‘You said we were going to be together next New Year. We were going to go to the Seychelles.’
        His hand passes over the dome of his skull, a gesture so Roan, so familiar, she can’t bear that she will still see him do that, but he won’t be hers.
        ‘I did. Yes. And maybe I was a little drunk when I said it.’
        ‘Hm.’ She rotates her coffee cup between her fingers.
        ‘I said a lot of things, I know I did. You have every right to be angry.’
        ‘I’m not angry.’
        One of his eyebrows pitches at this.
        ‘I’m not angry. I’m annoyed.’
        He shrugs. ‘Same thing.’
        ‘No. Not the same thing. You said your wife didn’t care what you did, that she’d be happy without you, that she was all about the kids anyway. Yet now, all of a sudden, what?’
        ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. Just…I can’t picture it anymore? I can’t picture leaving her. I can’t picture waking up every morning with you, and only seeing my kids at the weekends. I can’t picture any of it.’
        ‘You can’t picture it?’ she spits out the word.
        ‘No. I used to be able to, but I think that was when it seemed so out of reach. Like when you agree to doing something six months beforehand and it seems great but then when it’s two days beforehand you’re wishing you hadn’t signed up for it. Because you can’t picture it.’
        Tiny white sparks flash across her vision. ‘You’re a fucking arsehole,’ she says, quietly. ‘You really are. Listen to yourself.’
        She sees a muscle twitch in his cheek. He does not like being called an arsehole. This is something that she has learned about Roan these past few months; he does not like to be talked to harshly. He likes to be spoken to as if he is special. Roan is vain and delicate. She cannot tease him. She has tried and she has seen something pass across his face that looks like violence, like damage. But now she doesn’t care.
        ‘You’re ridiculous,’ she continues, ‘a ridiculous old man.’
        The muscle twitches again. She fixes him with her gaze. Then she says, ‘Fuck off, please.’
        He blinks at her.
        ‘Please,’ she says again.
        He pushes his chair away from the table. He looks almost as if he can’t believe his luck, that it has been this easy. That she hasn’t even shed a tear.
        He stops a few feet from the door of the café and he turns to her and he says. ‘Alicia. I’m so sorry.’
        ‘Go.’
        He nods and turns and leaves. He pretends to be sad, but there’s a lightness in his movements.
        He thinks it’s all over.
        But it isn’t. It’s only just begun.
        A small smile tugs at the corner of Alicia’s mouth.
        ‘Happy Valentine’s, Roan,’ she says under her breath. ‘Happy Valentines.’