Stay

Caitlin's summer has fallen apart. Betrayed by her best friend and her boyfriend, she is hitchhiking home with no money and no wish to arrive, because there is something waiting at home that will take her family apart.

A family stops for her: pleasant, easy, safe-seeming. They offer her a bed for the night at their isolated house rather than send her on in the dark, and she takes it. One night becomes two, then three. The couple are good company, the children need a tutor, and every extra day is a day she does not have to go home.

Then an older member of the household tells her to leave, now. Then her phone goes missing. Jane Bailey has spent the first half of the book making the house feel like a refuge, which is what makes the second half work: by the time Caitlin understands the arrangement she has walked into, leaving is no longer a decision she gets to make on her own.