In the end it’s Georgia who scoops up the mail. She studies the typing on a grey envelope and hands it to Tess. ‘One for you. And this big thing is the census form.’ She tucks the thick envelope under her arm and pushes the final item, a postcard, into her damp bathrobe pocket without looking at it properly. ‘I think today feels like a cauliflower cheese sort of a day.’

Tess shakes her head slightly, trying to work out the connection between the census and cauliflower cheese, but quickly gives up. ‘That sounds lovely. I’ll give you a hand with it later.’ She waits until Georgia has gone, picks up the paper knife that always sits on the hall table, and slides it under the flap of the envelope. As she pulls out the letter, she catches sight of the name of a firm of solicitors in the header.

She takes a deep breath.

He knows what she did.

This is her comeuppance for acting with sheer cold anger. There is, she thinks, hot anger, the sort that makes people thump one another, or race after a culprit without regard for the consequences, and then there is cold anger. Chilled fury, planned retribution.

Tess doesn’t want to know what the letter says, but she knows she has to read it. She has tried so hard to put everything to the back of her mind but it keeps rising to the surface, particularly now that spring is well on the way. It was inevitable that he would react. Only a matter of time. She wonders how he has worked out where she is. She had used the Royal Mail forwarding service and crossed her fingers that it would catch everything that was important. Is it possible that some company or other has written and inadvertently provided him with the information? Maybe the bank requesting confirmation of her change of address? She stands very still as an alternative suggests itself. His house, in Craiglockhart, isn’t that far away from Library Terrace. Maybe he has seen her? Or even followed her?

She walks through to the drawing room in a daze and stands in front of the fireplace until she can pull herself together. Tears blur her vision as she reads the letter and then rips it up as though she is a human paper shredder. She separates out a few sheets of the previous weekend’s newspaper and rolls each one diagonally from one corner to the opposite one, making the rolls tight and even, and then folds each thin tube into a triangle about the size of her hand before weaving the long ends in, making a slow-burning fire starter. It’s a lot easier with a broadsheet, she thinks, but these tabloid-sized sheets will have to do. She makes five, and adds them to the shreddings in the grate before putting a criss-cross of kindling on top and adding a few lumps of smokeless coal.

*