She is sitting so close to him that he can smell the citrus scent of her perfume, so fresh and youthful. He allows himself to reach out, to put his hand on hers. The smoothness of her skin – a thrill passes through him. He looks down at the paleness of the little hand caught beneath his own. She doesn’t try to move away. Hope flames in his heart.

‘There’s a look that comes into people’s eyes,’ she tells him, in that quiet, pensive way of hers, ‘when they find out what happened. They can’t help it. Even people who love you and want to protect you – still, the look is there. The dark curiosity in the backs of their stares, as if they’re trying to contemplate what it must be like to have a child in your care die in that manner.’

He loves her voice, its soft timbre, the way it lightly brushes against him.

And he knows all about the look of which she speaks. It’s the thing that bonds them – him and Leah. His grip on her hand tightens.

‘Even my father had it, when he thought I couldn’t see him, but I did. I’d catch him giving me that look, and I couldn’t bear it.’

She bites down on her lip. He sees how hard this is for her, how unfamiliar it feels for her to open up in this way. But he also knows she wants to go on. That she feels safe with him: they have a shared understanding.

‘It’s easier to just cut people off,’ she says. ‘Not let anyone get too close. I learnt that over time.’ A boyfriend she’d opened up to had reacted badly when she’d explained her past to him. ‘Not at first,’ she tells Anton. ‘But I could feel the gradual change. Then one day he told me he couldn’t shake it from his head. That it had changed how he saw me, what he felt about me. It made me a different person, in his eyes.’

After that, she’d made a decision. Better to shut that side of herself away, hide it from view. Shove it deep down into a dark corner, and never shed any light upon it. It was the rule that governed her life. And yet she had told him – Anton. She had marked him out in this special way. Surely that means something. Surely it points to some deeper understanding, some fated bond. The pad of his thumb draws across the skin of her palm. Does it send shooting messages through her nerve endings? She is so close to him. Her lips are full, gleaming with a smear of balm. Her perfume is in his nostrils.