Sadie shrugged. ‘You haven’t got your bag.’

‘Well, eagle eye, if you must know, I was working from home.’ They were holding hands and Gabriela hoped her daughter hadn’t felt her grip momentarily tighten.

As she watched Sadie run ahead to catch up with Callum, she thought perhaps she could do this, and then she felt the doubt drifting in again, without warning, creeping up on her like a fog, barely visible from a distance, but once it hit, so blinding that it enveloped everything.

Without Tom, the weekend passed quickly; a trip to the supermarket bleeding into hours loafing around the house, Callum kicking a ball against the wall of their tiny garden while Sadie drew, her legs tucked under her, curled on the sun lounger.

That Monday, she couldn’t be bothered to cook and so the three of them went for a quick pizza at the old Italian café on the roundabout by Parliament Hill Fields after tennis, the kids heading straight for the sofa when they got home, not noticing their father was already back as they grappled over the remote.

Gabriela spotted Tom through the kitchen doors pacing the bottom of the garden. It took a moment to register that he was on the phone. Even from this distance, she could sense the intensity with which he was speaking.

When he came back in, his eyes widened as he saw her standing there.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ he replied, attempting a smile. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Everything OK?’

‘Course. You?’

He brushed his hand over her back as he moved past.

‘Who were you talking to?’

He paused for a moment in the hallway and then replied, ‘Harriet, Millie’s mum. She was asking if Sadie could have a play date on Friday.’

When he turned to face her, Gabriela looked back at him in silence, acknowledging for the first time in their relationship that Tom was lying.

Chapter 28

Gabriela

It would be misleading to say that she hadn’t stopped thinking about Ivan since that first meeting in the Italian restaurant on Crown Passage – the man who would peel the skin from her body and reveal the rot. Aside from the occasional jolt of recollection in the weeks that followed, she had barely thought of him at all.

There had been so much else going on. Summer was fast approaching and with it a roster of school-related events, now that Sadie was finishing her first year, which Tom and she would split between them, the bulk of the daytime duties falling to him because otherwise how could she explain her sudden availability for Sports Day after being inescapably chained to the office for so long?

And what could she tell him, without putting their children’s lives at stake?