Book Review: What You Did

Title: What You Did
Author: Claire McGowan
Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Fiction

What It’s About: Allison “Ali” Morris’s is the mother of two children—Benji and Cassie—with her college sweetheart and lawyer husband, Michael Morris. The Morris family lives in Ali’s dream home in Bishopsdean, United Kingdom, which is a little run-down but perfect for her family as she believes. While Michael works at the law firm, she has been a stay at home mom, though in recent months, she’s gained popularity in the local news for speaking up against rape and advocating for women’s issues. Her profile is further raised as she is the Chair of Bishopsdean Women’s Refuge, a charity that helps women victims of violence.

She convinces Benji to sleep in Cassie’s room during the Reunion dinner that they are hosting by promising to ask their friend Bill, who lives in Sweden, to show Benji how to fish. Her best friend, Karen, arrives with her son Jake, rather early despite taking the Megabus and the two of them immediately start talking about different topics like they used to in college. One of the topic they touch upon is Ali’s discussion on TV about rape jokes and commentaries. This reminds Ali that she has to go on behalf of Women’s Refuge to meet with one of the victims. She leaves Karen with Mike, both of them engrossed in conversation so much that they don’t even notices that she’s left.

At the police station, Ali listens to Vix, the charity’s Director explain that one of the victim’s husband had come to the Refuge in the early hours of the morning, broke in through the kitchen, and found the victim in her room, where he proceded to choke her in front of their kids. One of the other women in the Refuge had pressed the alarm, and the police had come to the rescue. Ali asks Vix if she wrote up a statement, and Vix produces all of the information as she had previously worked in Public Relations. The statement hits all the right notes, and they make the decision to not move the refuge to a different location as this was a one-off incident that they do not believe will be repeated. Of course, Ali is worried that if one man could find it, other men could too which would in turn jeopardize the other women. Ali asks to see Julie, the victim, before she heads back home for the reunion, and introduces herself to her. The ladies chat for a bit, and then Ali heads home trying to be thankful for the life that she has because she had worked so hard to ensure that it wouldn’t involve domestic abuse—after all, she lived through that herself as her father had been verbally abusive most of the time, and physically abusive some of the time.

Ali arrives back home just as Callum and Jodi start unpacking their car. They talk a bit briefly, and Jodi sets Ali’s teeth on edge because she had brought some things with her, and Ali feels like Jodi doesn’t trust her to cook, but then she remembers that it took Jodi and Callum 15 years to get pregnant, after three ruinous IVF cycles. So she lets it go, and the three of them talk about the cost of the new house and Cassie comes by to say hi, before asking Jodi when she’s due— in a month or so. Michael offers everyone alcohol, and Cassie asks for a glass of wine, even though she’s under age. Mike gives her a glass, limiting it to just the one, because he’s always been the more easygoing of the two. Jodi asks to put her stuff in the room where they will be staying, and Ali runs up ahead—to her surprise, Karen is not in Benji’s room like she had planned her to be—and as they are talking about Bill, they hear him arriving in his bike.

As the dinner went on and on, they drank more bottles of wine. Karen believes that Jake could be Oxbridge material, but he doesn’t want to apply to university, and asks Bill to help convince Jake to go to a good school. It’s then that Jake snaps at his mom that she didn’t even pass the school they went to, which was a huge shock at the time because Karen was the smartest of them all. She was also the first one to have gotten pregnant with Jake at 25, though she never revealed who Jake’s father was, and her pregnancy was what made Ali want to have children of her own with Mike, after they had been newly married. The group continues to chat throughout the night, long after the kids go to sleep, and then eventually Bill, Jodi and Ali got to sleep leaving Karen, Mike and Callum alone talking.

Ali wakes up later that night and goes downstairs to the kitchen, where she finds Jodi with a mug of tea, standing over a passed out Callum on the couch. Suddenly, Karen comes in with everything askew, blood on her leg, and starts sobbing deeply—she had been raped and choked by Mike. Ali doesn’t believe it and rushes over to find Mike, who is sitting on the swing set, passed out. He doesn’t remember anything nor does he admit anything. Bill wakes up because of the sobbing and comes down, and Cassie comes in—clearly from being outside the house during the late hours of the evening. Confusion ensues, police are called in, statements are taken, and Ali is in shock—she doesn’t know who to believe, her best friend or her husband, but she knows that her husband would never do something like this. Karen, her son, and Bill leave the house to a hospital, and eventually get placed in a hotel/ apartment to stay in, as a way to separate them from the Morris Family.

As news makes it way through the small town, Ali is called in by her Women’s Refuge Charity and told to put out a statement that would align with the Charity’s mission—except she doesn’t believe that her husband could do this, and doesn’t want to destroy the family and the carefully built life she has. This results in her having to resign from her position as Chair, and then she finds out that Mike is being placed on leave as he cannot be a working lawyer in the UK with a record. Jodi and Callum awkwardly make their exit from the house, choosing to distance themselves from the matter, and Bill comes back to help Ali while she tries to figure out what to do. He takes care of her kids, making sure that they are fed, clothe and make it to school on time, while Ali tries to figure out what is going on.

She finds that her children’s school tuition hadn’t been paid, and that Mike was making payments to some company in Switzerland, but no one knows what for. Bill tries to figure it out for her, but they are unable to make any heads or tails of the matter. Cassie doesn’t want to return to school either, and isn’t being honest about where she had been that night—she had climbed out of the house to go meet with her boyfriend Aaron to have sex but then decided against it and came home, making it back in just as everything was coming undone. Karen comes by to try to talk to Ali, but they do not have much to say to each other—except that Karen makes it clear she has been sleeping with Mike for years, since the first time they met him, and that she had helped Ali back in college; covered up for her. But there is no resolution between the two women.

During their university days, one of their fellow students, Martha, had been murdered at the party on the grounds. Mike was the last person seen with her, and both Karen and Ali had said that Mike had been with Ali most of the time, even though no one could be sure as to his location. This is now being brought back into the spotlight and the police begin to consider Mike a suspect again in Martha’s murder. So Ali goes back to their university and talks to the Dean, who was Martha’s closest friend at the time. The woman tells her that Martha had broken up with her boyfriend and she hadn’t been upset about it, but she was definitely partying harder than usual. There’s guilt on her conscience that if she hadn’t left Martha alone, she would have lived. But Ali is not able to find out anything more that would help her help Mike for the sake of her children.

Mike, Ali, Karen, Cassie, and Jake go to court to hear that Mike is placed on bail pending the outcome of the court case. As the Morris family leaves the court, talking about how to get the money for Mike’s bail, Jake sees them and runs at them with a knife—seemingly at Cassie, but Mike throws himself in the way to protect his daughter. This lands Jake in jail, and Mike in the hospital with him getting profuse damage to his liver. Turns out that Jake had stolen the knife from the Morris family home, and used it on Mike in anger for hurting his mom. Jake has his own issues with the Morris family—he feels that they abandoned him and his mom when they moved from London to Bishopsdean. As a result, he goes to jail where he awaits his own trial. Ali isn’t sure how to help Mike in the hospital, and the doctor says that he will need a liver transplant—the first option is to try Cassie to see if she can be a donor for part of the liver to Mike and save his life. Ali doesn’t want to tell Cassie that but ultimately she makes the decision to tell her, and Cassie undergoes testing revealing that she would not be a suitable donor.

It also comes out after the fact that Jake is Mike’s son—Karen tells Jake the truth while he’s in jail, and Ali the truth after she tries to get some help from Ali to lower Jake’s sentence. Ali doesn’t believe it at first, and visits Jodi and Callum, whom she asks for photos in hopes she can figure out what happened to Martha. In those images, she also looks for connections between Karen and Mike, and then takes some of those images to the police department to say that Karen slept around a lot with various men—that is who she was—in order to try to save Mike from going to prison. The detective takes her statements, but it’s unclear whether or not he believes them. When Ali returns home and finds Bill there, a conversation ensues in which she tells Bill what she did. He is in disbelief, that he ends up leaving her—they had begun sleeping together during the ordeal.

It turns out that on the night of Martha’s death, Ali had gotten upset with Mike because he wasn’t paying attention to her at all. So she went for a walk with Bill around the campus—they were gone just the two of them walking for hours and talking. As the sun was coming up, she was making the decision to go for Bill; there was something between them after all, and let go of Mike. But once they returned to campus and found out what happened, Jodi suggested that Ali covers for Mike while she covers for Callum, and as a result Ali ended up with Mike. But she’s always wondered what if with Bill.

Because there is no viable donor for Mike, he will have to go on a waiting list for a liver, which is years’ long and his chances of survival go down. So Ali visits Karen in her apartment, and agrees to tell the detective that she heard Mike say that he’s sorry for what he did when she went to him at the swing in exchange for having a chance to talk to Jake to get tested for the liver. She changes her story again, and Karen lets her know when Jake will be available to talk to Ali, so Ali goes to see him in jail and asks him to at least get tested and give his father a portion of his liver. She struggles with seeing that Jake has some similarities with Mike—the same eyes—and cannot believe that she’s been unaware of all of this all these years.

Jake actually does go through with helping Mike in exchange for lenience on his sentence, but while this is all happening, Cassie also ends up in the hospital. Ali had asked her mother to come watch her children while she went to see Karen, and Cassie had taken some of her grandmother’s pills, resulting in an overdose that landed her in the hospital. This is because Aaron had ended things with her after she decided she didn’t want to have sex with him that night, so in an attempt to get him back, she sent him a nude picture of herself, which he ended up sharing with his friends. This got her expelled, and on top of her dad being in the hospital, and finding out Jake was her half-brother, Cassie couldn’t handle any more emotional/mental stress.

Then the messages come that Jodi is going into labor and Callum is nowhere to be seen. Ali goes to see Jodi at the hospital, and Jodi tells her that Callum is most likely at home because he doesn’t believe it was his kid. She reveals that they used a sperm donor to have this child after 15 years, which is why it suddenly becomes clear to Ali why Callum had made self-deprecating jokes about Jodi being pregnant. Still, Ali believes he is as much as this child’s father being that he will be there for the boy, so she goes to see him. Along the way she calls Karen and lets her know that Jodi is in labor, to which Karen responds that she’s already on her way.

Ali arrives at Jodi’s house and finds Callum in his study—he’s drunk. She tries to convince him to come with her, despite his worries that it will be very evident that the kid isn’t his. At that point Callum reveals that he’s never been able to come during sex—he has some kind of deficiency where he doesn’t have enough sperm, so that is why they went to the sperm bank. He then reveals that he had been seeing women and getting money from Mike to pay them off to keep the women quiet, in exchange for not telling anyone about Mike’s and Karen’s relationship. As he continues to tell the story it becomes very clear that he’s jealous—he feels like no one was attracted to him in college and all of the girls in their friends group were attracted to Mike, which pissed him off. So when Mike was hooking up with Karen on the side, while dating Ali full time, and then he got Martha alone, Callum wanted in. After Mike left Martha alone to sober up at the party, Callum had snuck up on her, and killed her. He also saw that Karen was being flirty with Bill and Mike during the reunion party but not with him. So when Mike passed out on the swing set, Callum put on Mike’s sweater—which was strongly smelling of aftershave because Mike couldn’t shower after having sex with Karen earlier in the day—and approached Karen, thinking that she wanted it as she had been flirty. He choked and raped her, and then apologized that he couldn’t finish. This in turn explained how come the police couldn’t find any other semen in Karen beside’s Mikes.

Once Callum admits this, Ali excuses her self to make something for him to come out of the alcoholic stupor. She dials Karen’s number, but before she can say anything to the phone, Callum puts his arm around her mouth and asks her who she is calling. She quickly realizes how easily Callum can overpower her, and she begs him to come clean to the police. He tells her that it’s over, it’s done, before asking her why she never paid any attention to him during their college years. She doesn’t have an answer, but pleads him to go see Jodi. Callum asks her if she told on Mike to the police, and she says that she had no choice but to do so in order to save Mike’s life. Then he tells her that she has no loyalty, because Mike gets in trouble, she tells on him, and then starts having sex with Bill. She feels that she’s unsafe, and begs him to not hurt her before there’s a sudden crack of pottery against his head, and he goes limp. Then she finds Karen standing there with pottery and a grim look on her face.

Later on, the two women are at the police department together when Ali asks Karen how she knew to come, and Karen says that it was the comment that he can’t finish that reminded her that the man who raped her had said “sorry, I can’t.” Callum had ended up in the same hospital as Jodi with a head injury. The two of them go over Callum’s story again—and Karen says that she wasn’t lying as the person who raped her had Mike’s jumper and his aftershave—the same jumper that Benji found in the trash pile that was going to be burned by their gardener. Ali recalls that Mike had taken it off because it was really hot, and Karen thinks that Callum put it on so she’d think it was Mike, because he knew about Mike and her. This makes Ali question how it’s possible that all of their friends knew about Karen and Mike but she was not aware of it. Karen also realizes that she was extremely drunk and Callum knew that she wouldn’t put up her guard around Mike. The two ladies agree to speak to the police and tell the story that it’s Callum that raped Karen, and almost hurt Ali.

In the end, Mike lives but gets separated from Ali. Karen and Jake live in London, and Jake is not in jail, but he’s been in and out of the hospital courtesy of his donation of his liver. Ali is moving out with her kids from their house, selling it, in exchange for a flat in London not too far from where they first lived when Cassie was little. She also realizes the lengths people would go to hang onto their lives, so she’s starting to understand why her mother stayed with her abusive father for so long. Callum’s trial was coming up in the autumn for Karen’s rape and Martha’s murder, while Jodi had her son. She named him Eric and cut herself off from everyone else.

From her perspective, Jodi spends time with her son Eric-after so many years of wanting her own child. As she settles him, she wonders if she had done the right thing, and remembers what had really happened. Something had woken her that night in Ali’s house, and she had gone down sure that Cal had escaped that nasty business at work with the girl being paid off. She had watched through the window as Jodi had weaved back and forth extremely drunk, the same way she had at the ball where Martha died. She had come down, seen that Mike was sitting on the swing, and saw other movement. Then she saw Callum in Mike’s jumper, and asked him what was going on, though Callum brushed it off with Karen lying on the ground behind him, not moving at all. She moved Callum through the living room, took his shoes off, told him to take the jumper off, and stuffed that jumper behind the pillows of the sofa. Then she ordered Callum to fall asleep on the couch while she made herself a cup of tea. Doing just as she’s done so many times before—covering for him, getting Callum away, because if anyone found out the truth, the life she spent 25 years building would come crumbling down. She took the sweater from the sofa after everyone had left the house and moved it into the rubbish pile at back remembering what Ali or Mike had said—it would be burned the following day. A

And it was the same thing as what had happened at the ball all those years ago—how she had hustled him away when she saw him stumbling drunk after it was announced that someone was dead. She had laundered his clothes, just to wash away anything that may tie him to the murder, just in case he had done something that would ruin the prestigious life they were about to embark on in London as lawyers. Callum had grown up with new cars every year, things that he took for granted but that Jodi never had growing up, so she knew she would have to protect that future. And that was what she did the night of the rape—it’s no wonder she went into Criminal Law, as she had that kind of mind looking for holes and details. She filed away what Callum had said and done that night somewhere within her so that she could save her life.

Jodi finds motherhood very easy and finds it shocking that she was so afraid that she wouldn’t be able to manage all alone, which is why she held onto Callum for so long. She was afraid of looking like a failure but really she should’ve done this years ago by herself. The idea that Callum would confess the truth to Ali horrified her up until she went into labor, which is why they hardly ever saw Ali after the party to keep a low profile, though Callum did go over once to Ali’s to find out what the police knew. At first she wasn’t aware what she had been covering up, and when Karen accused Mike of rape, she did nothing to see how it would fall out, knowing full well how rare these kinds of convictions were as a Criminal lawyer. But then Callum’s behavior got worse to the point that he had a threat of being fired, and she realized that she has to protect her and her son’s futures. Jodi could do better without Callum, and even though she could have stopped Ali because a drunk Callum meant he would spill the beans, she let Ali go and Callum tell what happened. Now he’s in jail, she’s got the house and the baby, with no expectation of ever seeing him again. It’s worked out in her favor.

My Thoughts: I was really interested in this Mystery Thriller, and it was a thriller all right. Definitely had me questioning whether Mike was the bad guy or not, though part of me suspected that he was unfaithful but not capable of these crimes. The truth about Callum then came out of nowhere—the unsuspecting couple with Jodi, but what’s more shocking is how she’s always been an accomplice to his crimes by covering them up because of the perfect fantasy that she wanted to live; the life that she wanted to escape. Same as Ali—how she would have gone with Bill (with whom she ended up with at the end anyway) had it not been that event where she had to lie for Mike and cover up for him to protect him from the law.

What’s really irritating though is Ali’s ever-changing story, and while I understand that she was trying to protect her family so that her kids could go to prestigious schools, I feel like humans wouldn’t go to that extreme length to protect others that were accused of such horrific crimes unless they were extremely brainwashed and abused at the hands of their spouses. Still, both Jodi and Ali show that they would do anything to keep up appearances with the Joneses and not be seen as a failure in society, at which point I want to only blame the societal norms that restrict people to thinking that they need to be or do something in a way to fit in. I dislike Ali for her lack of loyalty and Karen was my second least favorite character because of how she would spend over 25 years hooking up with her best friend’s husband, have a kid with him, but never come clean to her best friend. The whole group is disgusting for lying and hiding things from each other, which drives the point home that you truly cannot know everything about a person, but you would think that as close friends Karen would have better morals than to keep doing that to Ali if Mike didn’t want to come clean with her. Truly the only people that I think are somewhat blameless are Cassie, Benji and Bill. Jake to an extent, but his rage at Mike for hurting his mom which stems from a sense of abandonment by the Morris family when they moved out to Bishopsdean, is highly unusual.

Overall good fantasy story, but it doesn’t seem too grounded in the psychology of people who commit horrible crimes. Seems like the author just put together a bunch of coincidental situations and made a story out of it, though I do have to say it was easy to read until you actually thought through the motivations. And then the shell company in Switzerland that Mike was sending money to was never actually explained, but it almost seemed like a crumb that Ali could have followed to further investigate Mike’s lies. I wish she did because what he was doing was sounding a lot like Money laundering or someone attempting to squirrel money away to hide it from their spouses in event of a divorce so they wouldn’t have to pay a large child support but have access to money. Shady business there.