‘I was looking for you when I found Charlotte. She was coming in from the garden with her little boy, and it was clear she was worked up. “Looking for your wife?” she asked me, in a catty kind of way. And then she told me to look for you in her husband’s shed.’

Hilary feels the breath drawing into her lungs, the cold rattle of it. Her feelings colour with shame as she listens to him tell of how he’d gone down into the garden, how it was dark, how he’d seen them emerge from the shed, watching from the shadows while Anton helped her fix her clothing, the two of them clinging together for one last embrace. The thought that he was there in the darkness of the garden witnessing that – not the sex, but the attempt at concealment, the way they separated from each other, him going back in first, followed a minute later by her, each of them shaking themselves off, trying to look ‘normal’ … Nineteen years ago but the memory feels vivid and fresh.

‘What then?’ she asks softly, needing to draw him on, not wanting him to lose the story now when they are so close to the truth.

He shrugs sadly, his eyes inward-looking, weary with remembering.

‘I pretended nothing’d happened. Rejoined the party, kept on drinking. I couldn’t look at you, though.’ His eyes flick to hers, something sharp in his gaze. ‘So when you told me you were going home, I said I’d stay on. Somehow I felt you were relieved at that.’

She holds his gaze, heavy with accusation. ‘Please go on,’ she urges softly.

The hardness in his stare fades.

‘I stayed on, even when the party dwindled. At one point, Charlotte came over to me and asked me if I was okay. I said yeah, even though it was clear I wasn’t. She suggested I stay on until everyone else had left. I knew what she meant, so I asked, “What about Anton?” She told me not to worry. That she’d got rid of him. We’d be alone and free to enact our revenge, she said. I knew full well what she wanted and part of me wanted it too. I was so shocked by what you’d done. I couldn’t believe it. It was stupid, but I thought, Why not? Why shouldn’t I, if that was the way you were carrying on?’

A certain bullishness has entered his tone, an angry self-righteousness. She does not challenge him. She knows that if she is patient, if she is calm, the truth will come out.