A basket is held to the flare of her hip and she stoops now to set it down in the grass. White sheets billow and flap in the breeze, and she stretches to unpeg them, half turning so he can see her in profile – slender arms, the swell of her breast, grace in her movements and a sort of containment to her, as if she is utterly lost within her own thoughts.

‘Dad?’

A change in his voice. A dip of seriousness.

The sun on her head.

‘You will watch yourself, won’t you? You won’t do anything … stupid?’

The delicate stalk of her neck.

‘Don’t you dare,’ Charlotte says, her voice finding him by the window, the low threat of her words curdling inside him.

But Charlotte is dead, and Anton has done his time. Nineteen years in the hotel. The crime punished. The debt paid. Charlotte’s words can’t touch him now. He is a free man.

He pulls back from the window but does not move away entirely. Half hidden by the shadows, he watches the young woman come. The movement of her hips, the dreamy grace of her expression. As he follows her with his eyes, the breath catches in Anton’s throat.

3

Hilary

Hilary and Greg are in the car on the way into town when he breaks the news to her.

She’s peering into the little mirror behind the sun-visor, dabbing at her eyelashes with the mascara wand, when she hears him clear his throat in that particular way of his and say: ‘Look, Hil. There’s something I need to tell you.’

She feels a little inward sigh at his words and the tone they are said in. After twenty-five years of marriage, she’s used to this. Used to having small disappointments broken to her in this manner: a school commitment that prevents him from going on that weekend away they’d planned, some error in their tax return that has just been discovered, a translation offer for his first book that has failed to materialize. The slow burn of life’s disappointments, always heralded by that sombre warning tone of his.

He doesn’t take his eyes off the road, and she keeps dabbing at her lashes, steeling herself for whatever new negative is about to come at her.

‘It’s Anton,’ Greg says. ‘He’s out.’

She lowers the wand, turns her head and stares at him. ‘What?’

Greg keeps his eyes on the traffic ahead, even though a bombshell has just gone off in their car. She finds herself staring at the side of his face, the sprinkling of white through the red of his trimmed sideburns, his inflamed cheek, which she notices now he’d nicked while shaving.

‘How?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know. I suppose he’s done his time.’

‘No, I mean how do you know this?’