Winter emerged like a sheet of ice that year, wrapping itself around the city. The wind that whipped across the Heath battered at the back door of the house, begging to be let in.

Gabriela and Tom were settled in the living room with Callum, having spent the day dressing the Christmas tree all together before Sadie headed out to the cinema with friends.

‘Mummy and Daddy bought this decoration in Scotland, the year you were born,’ she heard Tom say to Callum as she reached for a third glass of wine, Nat King Cole crackling out from the record player, unwanted thoughts rising up inside her with every note. There was one emerging thought in particular that she was placing firmly out of mind as she picked up the bottle and topped up her glass. Not so much unwanted as unthinkable, for now. A thought that, once named, she knew would overshadow everything else.

She and Ivan had met up at least once a week over the past months, in and around the bars and hotels of St James’s Square, creating their own separate world away from the crowds that milled around them. It was astonishing that they were never caught, and yet every moment that their relationship went unchecked acted as quiet confirmation to Gabriela that what they were doing was predestined.

By December, she understood how tightly woven the web of lies had become. Yet for the moments when it was just the two of them, it was so uncomplicated that it was impossible to tally that aspect of her life with the complications that rose up as a consequence of it. That single thread of her existence felt clearer than anything else she had felt in years. He was the only one who asked nothing more of her than she was willing and able to give. There was a transactional clarity to their relationship that she lacked in every other aspect of her life, a straightforwardness to the emotion that ran between them. But the truth was, the complications were impossible to ignore, bleeding as they did into every other aspect of her life.

How long could she keep it up, the charade that had become her daily life? How long could she lie about where she was going each morning, before someone or something caught her out? How long could she distract herself from what she already knew was happening, refusing to acknowledge the sensations that swirled inside her?