When Earth is conquered by the sinister Greys and the alien who killed Evie's husband returns seeking her help, she must find a way to enact her revenge and fight the growing feelings for the creature who is an exact replica of the man she loved.
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The day after Tom was killed, I felt mostly numb. Wrapped in a blanket that my best friend, Monica, had draped around my shoulders as I sat on the large corner sofa in the living room, it was as if I was the one who was dead.
I felt nothing. No pain. No anguish. Just this all-consuming numbness that engulfed my whole body. I think, if I had pricked my finger or run a blade across my palm, I wouldn't even have felt the sting.
Just an endless nothing.
At some point, after hours of people coming and going - the headteacher from the school where Tom worked, Tom's sister Tania who'd screamed at me until I'd finally turned my face away from the window and looked directly at her, DI McCain, the police inspector who'd walked mud onto the hallway rug - I'd drifted into the kitchen, the blanket falling free from my shoulders when I saw Tom's coffee mug on the worktop, unwashed since the day before.
It was an ugly cup, some hideously decorated merchandise of one of his favourite bands and I'd always been on at him to get rid of it, but he'd steadfastly refused, declaring that coffee and tea tasted much better in the ugly mug than any other cup.
It was just a cup. A stupid cup. Yet the sight of it made my legs give way underneath me, because all I could think about was how he would never drink from that cup ever again. He was everywhere around me. In the pictures he had hung on the wall, constantly cursing because he was shit at DIY. In the stack of DVD's on the TV unit, that he insisted on keeping even though we watched everything on streaming services. In the sweater he had chucked on the back of the sofa, telling me he'd definitely put it in the laundry later and then left it there for three days. I couldn't have walked anywhere in the house without seeing him, but it was the cup that tipped me over the edge.
Months later, when I'd had to move out because of all the trouble – and because I couldn't keep up the mortgage repayments on my own – the cup came back to haunt me once more when it broke in transit. The handle fell off, a small crack at the base that kept growing and growing until even superglue wouldn't hold it, and I'd cried all over again, clutching the broken cup to my chest as I'd sobbed like I hadn't done in ages. It had felt like a kick to the stomach, hard and violent and unrelenting, until I thought I might be bruised forever.
The truth was, I was still bruised by it all. Broken. Never to be fixed.
As I stared at the Grey now, I couldn't help but think of that stupid bloody cup and how much I'd ached to see him drink from it again, dunking a biscuit in it and then staring forlornly into the tea when half the biscuit dissolved beneath the surface.
'You're actually being serious, aren't you?' I said.
The Grey's expression faltered, his mouth turning down into a frown that I had always thought adorable on Tom's face.
That was it.
That was why I couldn't shake the image of the damn mug from my head. I was looking at the Grey's mouth, remembering what it was like to see Tom sip at his tea.
