She was on her way to meet Madeleine the following day, having told Tom and the kids she was taking a lieu day after her working weekend, when the bank rang. The news of Emsworth’s dismissal was still swimming in her head as she answered the phone. Amidst everything that was happening with Ivan, with so much else to keep her awake at night, Gabriela had almost forgotten he existed.

‘Ms Shaw, I’m calling about your mortgage. I just wanted to check everything was OK as we seem to be missing a repayment,’ the voice at the end of the phone said.

Gabriela’s mind had been firmly elsewhere, trying to compute the scant details from the previous evening’s news report, so that she had to make the woman at the end of the line repeat herself, stopping briefly to shelter from the wind in South End Green.

‘That can’t be right,’ she countered. There was no way she could have missed something as big as this, and yet how long had it been since she went through her accounts?

‘I’ll call you back,’ she said, picking up speed as she moved towards the cash machine attached to the old cinema in South End Green where she’d watched her first ever film with her dad. The cinema had long been closed, the building gutted, the contents and all those memories scooped out and dumped in a landfill somewhere before the shell of the building was converted into an M&S food hall.

Mentally, she tried to draw out the details from the past few weeks, finding her thoughts moving just out of reach whenever she tried to focus on one, shifting so that she couldn’t quite pin it down. She had never felt sick with Sadie or Callum, but she seemed to have an almost constant feeling of nausea this time around. Keeping on top of her finances while juggling the complexity of her various lies, meant her brain was constantly being pulled in six directions at once. It was as though her own body and mind were now working against her, pulling tricks so that whatever she did, she was doomed to fail.

There was a wind whipping through the trees. As she stood in the queue for the cash machine, she glanced back over her shoulder to check she was alone. It was new, this most recent feeling of being watched. She felt it in waves, the sensation that some creature was crawling through the crevices in her body, worming its way inside the knotted jumble of thoughts in her head, threatening to expose her.