‘That’s not our problem.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘It is, Tom! Her mother, she made me swear if anything happened to her, that I would make sure Layla was OK. I can’t let her down. I won’t.’

Gabriela’s voice is desperate now; the tears fall thick and fast so that no matter how quickly she pushes them away, more fall in their place.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’

Tom sighs heavily on the other side of the table, and when she looks at him she sees there are tears in his eyes, too.

Chapter 82

Gabriela

Once she has had a shower, desperate to clear her mind, she heads back downstairs, leaving Layla sleeping in the cot at the end of her bed. On her way down, she puts her head around the door of Saoirse and Jim’s room and sees her older children side by side in the bed. Sadie’s arm is resting protectively over her brother’s body. For the first time it strikes her that there is no trace of Jim in the house.

In the kitchen, the kettle is warm to the touch and as she refills it at the sink, she spots Tom at the cliff edge at the end of the garden where the land gives way to the sea. Gabriela stands and watches for a while, through the small square frame of the window. His hair, mostly grey now, moves with the breeze and she has an overwhelming urge to reach out to him.

He must sense her approaching as she walks down the hill towards him, a pot of coffee and a mug in her hands, for as she takes a seat on the bench next to where he is standing, he doesn’t flinch.

‘Do you remember the first time we came here?’ he asks as she takes his cup from him and refills it, handing it to him before pouring one for herself.

‘Callum was a baby. It was just before you went back to work after your maternity leave; Sadie must have been nearly three. I remember thinking how lucky we were. Jim and Saoirse, they had this house, this freedom, but we had each other, the kids. A family. You know how much I wanted to move to the country, even then, but I remember looking out from the house and seeing you and the kids lying out on a rug down here and thinking fuck it, it doesn’t matter. I thought no matter what happened, so long as I had you, my family, I was the luckiest man in the world.’

She sighs, struggling to remember the holiday. There is a flash of recollection, but when she tries to hold it there in front of her the image moves away. There is so much from that time that she cannot remember.