And then he looks up. His pale-blue eyes are brittle, his mouth taut.

‘Maggie,’ he says, remaining seated.

‘Hello, Sean.’

I pull the chair out and sit down. He leans back and folds his arms across his chest defensively.

‘It’s so good to see you,’ I say, my voice cracking. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I got your letter.’

‘Shall we cut the small talk?’ he says, his voice hard. ‘I came here because I want answers.’

I nod my head. ‘Ask me anything.’

He takes a deep breath. ‘How long was it going on?’ he says. ‘The affair with Ben Cosgrove?’

‘There wasn’t an affair,’ I say. ‘I mean, I’d been in touch with him. And there was a part of me that always wondered what had happened to him. But his text on the day of the accident, the one you saw on my phone, was actually from Barbara pretending to be Ben.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘I don’t really know, Sean,’ I say. ‘I guess because she hated me.’

‘I read about it in the papers,’ he says, leaning forward in his seat. ‘Ben. The baby. Why didn’t you tell me, Maggie? All those years we were together and you never once mentioned it. You knew I’d have understood, just like I understood about the unit. I just don’t get it.’

‘I know you would have listened,’ I say, flinching as someone scrapes a chair across the floor behind me. ‘But I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. I was so young, I … Sean, some things are just too big, too painful to talk about. The baby was one of them.’

His face remains stony. I put my head in my hands. This wasn’t how I imagined it would be.

‘And what about you?’ I say, looking up. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the house and the debts?’

‘Because I didn’t want to hurt you,’ he says, his tone softening. ‘For fuck’s sake, Maggie, I loved you so much.’

‘Then why the hell did you disappear?’ I cry. ‘I had no idea what had happened to you. At first I thought you’d harmed yourself, then I thought you’d run off with another woman.’

‘I needed to start again,’ he says, sighing. ‘My life had just imploded. My little girl was dead. You … you’d betrayed me, or so I thought. The only way I could deal with it was to run as far away as possible. You and … and Elspeth were my world.’

‘Ditto,’ I say, my eyes filling with the tears I’ve been trying to repress.

‘Ditto?’ he says, his eyes flaring. ‘You locked our child in a car then let it roll into the fucking river. You took her out at night to meet your ex when she should have been safely tucked up in bed.’