I do also want to find Jill and ask why she never once wrote to me. I’ve never revealed to anyone how much I tore myself apart searching for clues for what seemed utterly inexplicable. I’d been desperate to cling to our friendship. The pain of being forgotten and so easily discarded had ripped through me, though I’d never let on how much when my family was already taping over cracks and trying to form some semblance of a normal life in a new city.

But it’s only one of the many boxes whose lids are starting to flip open. Now there are voices in my head I haven’t listened to in years and I can’t get them to shut up.

‘Have you spoken to your dad about it?’ Tanya is asking.

I snap my head up, pull myself out of my thoughts. ‘Not yet,’ I say, turning towards my office. The fact is, I don’t want to open up a conversation about the island with him, because while he’s the only one who could tell me why he made us leave, I’m not entirely sure I trust him any longer.

I have barely asked my clients how they are when she blurts out, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him. All I can see every night is him with her.’ The words catch in her throat and she looks into the corner of the room to hide her face from her husband. As it is, he is studying his hands, folded in his lap.

‘I don’t think he should have told me,’ she says. ‘I think he only did it to ease his own conscience. He thought he’d feel better for it.’

‘That’s not true,’ he murmurs and I ask him if he can explain what he means. Really I just want him to talk.

‘I don’t know what you’re asking,’ he says.

‘She means why did you tell me,’ his wife spits.

He glances over at her. ‘Because you kept asking. You begged me to tell you. I thought it’s what you wanted.’

‘What I wanted?’ she cries. ‘What I wanted was for you not to sleep with another woman.’

The colour drains from his face and he hangs his head again. There’s little he can say to make amends, but at the same time I must coax him to try. Meanwhile she is continuing to talk but keeps coming back to the same thing – that she wishes she didn’t know.

‘Would you do it differently if you had the chance?’ I ask her.

‘What?’ She screws her eyes up at me.

‘I mean, if you went back to the point when you begged your husband to tell you the truth. Would you ignore what you thought you wanted to know?’