She means well but if I’m honest food is the last thing on my mind. When I was sent away as a teenager I stopped eating. After the bad thing happened I wanted to punish my body and I did a very good job of it. When I came out my mother gasped because I was so thin. She tried feeding me up but I couldn’t eat more than a few morsels without feeling sick. I was still suffering when I met Sean. He knew I had issues with food but he never pushed it or made me feel uncomfortable. In the end it was getting pregnant with Elspeth that made me better. The fact that my body had been given a second chance, that I had another life inside me, made me want to nurture it. When she was born and they placed her in my arms I made a promise to her that I would stay strong for her, that I would never get ill again.

But I didn’t keep my promise. I let her down. I look at the small round dining table standing in the middle of the kitchen and I feel sick. How could I even begin to think about cooking a meal? The very act of setting a table just for me, without Sean and Elspeth, is too painful to contemplate. I can hear the old voice rising up again, the one I used to hear when I was sent away, the one that told me it was my fault, that I should punish myself. My stomach rumbles with hunger but I ignore it. The voice is right. I deserve to be punished.

I rinse my coffee cup and put it on the draining board. But as I turn to walk out of the kitchen I hear something. A voice. I look up at the ceiling. According to Amanda, the tenant in the upstairs flat is a bedridden elderly woman. ‘No loud parties, then,’ Sonia had remarked. But the noise is not coming from above, it’s coming from next door, from my bedroom.

‘Hello,’ I call as I tiptoe out of the kitchen, my skin prickling with fear. ‘Who’s there?’

This is a ground-floor flat. A prime target for burglars. I should call the police but my phone is on the sofa in the living room and I am here, standing in the dark hallway that connects the kitchen to the bedroom and bathroom, frozen with fear.

And then I hear something that makes every hair on my head stand on end. Someone is singing. As I edge along the corridor it gets louder and that’s when I recognize the voice and the song.

‘The moon is shining bright tonight.’

‘Elspeth?’ I whisper as I approach the bedroom door.

‘We’re all warm and cosy tight.’

‘Elspeth, baby, where are you?’