After Jake leaves, she sits on the couch with Matthew. On the table-top in front of them Finding Dory plays on the laptop. In recent days, the little boy has started to relax more around her. He watches the screen with lazy eyes, half leaning against her, tired, while Leah flicks through her phone.

The browser is still open with the results of her previous search, and now she scrolls through them until she finds an article from the time of Anton’s trial. Opening it, she scans the headline, but her attention is caught by a photograph of Charlotte posted beneath the by-line. A colour picture, it shows a woman whose reddish dark hair is threaded with coppery streaks and carefully done, as if for an occasion. Red lipstick to match the red top she wears, a silver heart on a chain around her neck. She gazes into the camera, clear-eyed beneath slender brows, something distant and vague in the way she smiles. Dreamy. Distracted. Everything Leah knows about this woman she has learnt from Anton, whose account can no longer be trusted.

What were you like? she wonders, examining the face on the screen. Brown eyes, heavily lashed. How soon after this picture was taken was she killed? And did she have any idea, any inkling at all, of the violence that was coming?

She was murdered in the kitchen, according to the accounts Leah has read, stabbed to death. Leah cannot imagine Anton doing such a thing, although it is all there in black and white, a conviction and sentence, no appeal. She thinks of the time she has spent with him, the conversations they have had. His presence had felt reassuring, not threatening. She had perceived him to be a kind, lonely man, but more than that, she had felt he understood something about her that she could not easily explain to others.

‘Is that you?’ Matthew asks, and she glances down at him.

He’s peering across her at the picture on her phone.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she says, laughing lightly, but he peers more closely and shrugs.

‘It looks like you,’ he states, then turns his attention back to the laptop.

Leah examines the picture now, in a different light. The round curve of Charlotte’s face, the set of her eyes. The long bow of her smile. A jolt goes through her as she realizes the boy is right. That dreamy expression. Viewed from a certain angle, the resemblance is uncanny.

13

Hilary

‘You look nice,’ Greg says.

Hilary is just coming in from the garden, her secateurs in one hand, some freshly cut snapdragons in the other. Leah and Jake are due at any minute. She wipes her feet on the mat, then moves to the sink.

‘Thank you,’ she says, laying down the flowers to fill a vase with water.