I step outside. The farmyard is bathed in moonlight. Up ahead I see the shadowy outline of the playhouse, the door swinging off its hinges. Then I see Julia crouched outside it. I walk towards her across the gravel. When she sees me approach she looks up.

‘I shouldn’t have come back,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘I should have just left it all in the past.’

‘No,’ I say, putting my hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m glad you came. You’re the best thing to have come out of all this horror.’

She turns to me, her face flushed from crying.

‘Do you mean that?’

I nod my head.

‘I was so angry with you,’ she says, looking down at her feet. ‘For years I was angry. Frey– Barbara told me to stop sending the letters after a while. She said that you didn’t want to know me, that you were a bad person, that you’d tried to kill me.’

‘Oh, Julia,’ I say, squeezing her hand in mine. ‘That wasn’t how it happened. I was trying to kill myself, not you. I was so young and confused. I needed help but there was no one around to give it.’

‘After that, she stopped visiting,’ says Julia. ‘Though she wrote to me from time to time. When I graduated from Cambridge she sent me a card.’

‘You went to Cambridge?’ I say, suddenly realizing there is so much I don’t know about my daughter. ‘That’s amazing.’

‘It was the happiest time of my life,’ she says. ‘The only place I’d ever lived where I didn’t feel like a freak.’

‘You’re not a freak,’ I say. ‘You’re an exceptionally gifted young woman.’

She manages a small smile.

‘I’ve waited so long to hear that,’ she says. ‘For you to be proud of me. You know, in a weird way, what I thought was your rejection actually spurred me on. I forced myself to be the best so that I could show you I was worth something.’

My eyes fill with tears. There is so much I want to say and yet it’s just so big, so fundamental, where do I even begin?

‘Why did you come to find me?’ I say, remembering the first time I saw her, standing in the doorway of Larkfields, glaring at me. ‘It can’t have been a coincidence that you were living in that house.’

‘I got the job in Lewes,’ she says. ‘Until then I’d been living in London but when I saw the role advertised it just seemed like fate. I think part of me thought it might help me put my demons to rest. I got in touch with Barbara again to see if she might help me make the move. But then she called to say that there’d been an accident.’

‘My accident?’

Julia nods her head.