She pulls the covers up, stays very still. Her thoughts, so muddy and unfocused over the past few days, now sharpen and draw in. All at once the oddness of her presence in this room – in his mother’s bed – seems blatant. Obscene, almost. What if Mark comes up here? She cannot imagine how she would explain it, and part of her knows that explanations would be futile. A woman in her nightdress, the bed in disarray. The conclusion he would draw is obvious. And yet she does not think of Anton in that way. While not exactly fatherly, there’s a reassurance in his maturity linked to an understanding of her. It feels as if he, more than anyone else in the world, can fully understand what it’s like to be her.

She pulls the bedclothes tight around her, slowly sits up. Her eyes scan the room, taking in the handsome dresser, the heavy mahogany wardrobe. She recalls a basket of clothes on the floor by the window, but when she looks for it now, she cannot find it.

Mark has gone into the kitchen. From her eyrie upstairs, she hears the scrape of a chair drawn out from the table. Moments later, the front door opens and closes again, and she hears Anton’s familiar tread across the hall, then his voice in the kitchen, raised in surprise.

Sunlight falls at a slant through the curtains. It hits the side of her face, trapping her with its heat. Her mouth is dry, her eyelids heavy, a crust of hardened tears clinging to the lashes. Fragments of thoughts and dreams stick to her – a muddied mass drifting and crowding her weary brain. She keeps thinking of her father in the car, taking her home after the police had interviewed her and she’d given her account of what had happened. The way he’d glanced at her in the rearview mirror. ‘Are you sure now, Leah, that there’s nothing else?’ Doubt in his eyes – a brief flash, but she’d caught it. Enough to pierce her heart. The same way that Jake had looked at her. A quick blaze of disbelief, followed by doubt, like a sort of shyness. Like he couldn’t bring himself to look at her properly, afraid of what he might see.

She wonders where he is now. He had told her he was going to his parents’ house, but she is convinced he’s gone back to Jenna and Matthew. Already what Leah and Jake had shared together has vanished, disintegrated under the heat of these revelations. He would never trust another word she said.

‘These things happen,’ Anton had told her, in the soft, gentle way he had. ‘It doesn’t always help to look for a reason.’

She feels the truth in that. She has driven herself close to madness in the past, hunting for some deeper meaning behind events in her life over which she had no control.