The sound of the windscreen wipers scraping against the glass punctuates the silence as Gabriela watches the fields morphing into a scenery she cannot yet fully imagine.

Her eyes move between the wing mirror, checking for signs that they are being followed, and Tom, who sitting beside her in the driving seat, focused on the road, his face completely unreadable to her now.

The drive to Plymouth will take less than an hour at this time of day.

Behind them are their children – her children – the three of them side by side in the back seat, Sadie’s face red and swollen, fixed away from her mother’s. Callum is looking at Layla, whose eyes are closed in sleep, as if regarding a strange animal, trying to work out whether it poses a threat.

As the car moves along the motorway, their broken but irrevocably fused together family locked within its doors, she pulls out her phone and dials Madeleine’s number. As she does so, she hears her words again, yesterday, in the restaurant.

‘Irena knows who you are. We have a phone recording from the day Ivan told her about you. It was not long after you became pregnant. Of course she had you investigated, someone was following you for weeks. When she found out you had another family, she told Ivan.’

Her heart had stopped briefly at that, recalling that feeling she couldn’t shake, the sense of constant surveillance that she had put down to a guilty conscience.

Madeleine continued. ‘He didn’t believe her, and then even once she’d provided him with incontrovertible evidence – photos, I think, of you and the kids, of Tom – he still chose to believe that you would leave them eventually. He told her he’d always known it was complicated, that you’d never lied about that fact.’

For a moment, as Madeleine had spoken, she’d felt sorry for him. All along, he was waiting for her to tell him she’d chosen him. Despite all the evidence telling him she would never leave her family, he had still chosen to believe she would.

She swallowed, remembering the shift in Ivan’s way with her, how tetchy he’d been for a while not long after she told him about the baby, and then the outburst when she told him she was going back to work, how out of character it had seemed. By then he had known she had another family, he had known about Tom and Sadie and Callum. He had seen pictures.

The thought makes her feel physically sick. Not just sick for him, but for herself, too. How is it possible that she can feel betrayed at this revelation? And yet she does.

Turning her thoughts back to what she has to do next, she presses the call button and the phone rings just once before Madeleine answers. ‘Gabriela?’