Leah reads on, riveted, and as she reads, the brightness of her disbelief begins to cloud, as the details emerge in print before her eyes: the marriage gone awry, the terrible revenge, all of it enacted in the rooms above her home. Her thoughts go to that afternoon when he had brought her upstairs. She remembers the hallowed sense of reverence she had felt, seated at that piano, the smooth coolness of the keys beneath her fingertips. Hard now to think of those rooms, knowing the dark history held within them. A woman met a violent death there. Another image comes to her: she is standing at the bottom of the stairs, pushing her weight against the door, hammering and calling to Matthew to open it. And when she glanced back up the stairs, there was Anton looking down. His expression was lost to her – he was a silhouette against the sunlit hall beyond. But for just a second or two she had sensed it – some dark hesitation within him – and in that moment, she had felt afraid.

The door to the house opens. Leah switches off the screen of her phone, puts it away. She watches Matthew come out, Jake behind him carrying his bag. Jenna stands on the doorstep, watching them leave. She is small, with short-cropped hair, but there is nothing boyish about her. Leah does a quick appraisal: white T-shirt, denim cut-offs, tennis shoes, tanned limbs. It’s easy to see why Jake had fallen for her. An involuntary spasm of envy passes through Leah, of which she feels immediately ashamed.

She raises her hand to wave, but Jenna is already withdrawing back into the house. The white plastic door closes firmly. Leah sits there, feeling the missed opportunity. Perhaps she should have gone inside with Jake.

‘Hey there!’ she says to Matthew, craning around to smile at him as he climbs into the back seat.

‘Hiya.’ He looks flushed, anxious to get going.

‘You got everything?’

‘Yep.’

‘Everything okay?’ she asks Jake, as he shuts the driver’s door. The muscles of his face look stretched and tight.

‘Yeah, fine.’ He buckles his seatbelt. In the back, Matthew does the same.

‘You sure?’

‘Let’s just get home and eat.’

He starts the engine, rolls the windows fully down. Hot air buffets the back of Leah’s head, and as the car pulls away, one of the boys who has been circling on his bike tosses a can at the vehicle. They feel the metallic clink of the impact and Jake sticks his head out of the window. ‘Get fucked, you little prick!’

And then he draws his head back in through the window, slams his foot on the accelerator – Leah’s hands grip the seat beneath her – and the car roars away.

She waits until they are home, lunch finished, the dishes put away, before she asks him.