‘I’m guessing, Sofia, that you’re a high-functioning addict. After all, you continued to work, even operate. And you told me yourself they don’t test doctors like they test athletes, that even after a death it’s not mandatory. But you got scared after that surgery went wrong. And you were flagged – for the wrong reason, a glass of wine at a bar, but flagged all the same. Because what the coroner does look for is patterns. Maybe there are other incidents, smaller, everyday ones that can’t be helped, around you. Maybe, like each individual fleck of snow that falls on this mountain, they are not so damning on their own, but together, a picture starts to build. So Sofia approached you, Katherine, because her addiction was spiralling, and she knew she was under a closer watch and that she’d fail a drug test if the coroner called for one,’ I continued. ‘If she shows up to court next week with oxy in her system, she’ll stand no chance.’ Sofia had jokingly asked me if I was free next week, when I was planning out how to be Michael’s faux-lawyer, inadvertently revealing the timing. ‘So this weekend is her last chance to get clean. That’s why you’ve been so snappy with her. That first breakfast you went out of your way to enforce that she wasn’t a doctor, because by then you’d already searched her room and found the pills. You were upset that she’d hidden them from you, but you were also trying to scare her into understanding what’s on the line: her whole career, her whole identity. You asked Marcelo to cut her off too – that’s why he’s refusing to help her. Though he will if he has to, we all know that. But for this weekend, you needed to scare her straight. You tried to get me to doubt her too. She had to feel like she was on her own.’

Marcelo gave a gentle, apologetic nod to Sofia. I’d figured that one out because of what he’d admitted when I’d accused him of playing favourites between Michael and Sofia. He’d stammered out: that’s not entirely true. Michael had told me that Robert and Audrey had used the same tactic on Katherine all those years ago: cutting her off. It was also the advice Katherine had given Michael to try on Lucy’s financial issues. A last resort.