‘I was planning to bring him back to you, but then, well…’ Petra gestured at the low-ceilinged lounge, looking and smelling like an anonymous reception room in a mid-budget hotel.

‘I know. You’re a good girl.’ And it was this that started Petra crying for the first time today. It was a presumptuous platitude, but right now she couldn’t recall Helena ever saying it to her.

‘No.’ Petra shook her head, feeling the seven-year-old’s pout screwing up her lips. ‘No, I’m not. At least, I don’t want to be.’

A lot had changed in the past ten days, now that she’d had some time to process what she’d gone through. She’d seen ghosts at Sling Sutton – she’d seen and spoken to Olivia and Rashida, both dead actors; she’d seen and spoken to Helena while she was lying dead in the Clarendon Hospital, fifteen miles away. She knew and accepted this now, like she knew and accepted what she’d had for breakfast and what stock she’d unpacked at Needful Things yesterday. She would have expected this knowledge to remodel her entire philosophy, to fundamentally shatter the certainties of her worldview, but it didn’t. It slotted in alongside what else she knew of the world. Maybe she was dissociating, maybe was suffering the precursor of a devastating breakdown, but it didn’t feel like it. It wouldn’t, would it?

‘Do you think he’ll be okay? He’s not planning to disappear again, is he?’

‘He’s doing fine, darling – he’s sleeping better, drinking less, since he went to that concert. So whatever he went for, maybe he found it.’

‘Good.’

Gloria took her hand. Her fingers were warm, callused, slick with moisturiser. ‘You should spend some time looking after yourself.’ With a final squeeze she turned towards the door. ‘I’ll get him to call you, but I for one won’t blame you if you don’t want to answer.’

* * *

‘I didn’t know if you would even be… here anymore. You were planning to off yourself, weren’t you?’ He called her less than two hours later, while she was queueing in the bank for a consultant on her mother’s account. It was the wrong place, the wrong time, but her anger at him boiled over. It had never stopped simmering.

‘I owe you an explanation, a big apology. But do you really want to talk about it, about me, today?’

‘Why not?’

‘You know, I thought I could find Beccie again. I thought she was calling me to join her, but I was wrong. She didn’t need me there, where she is. She only wanted to talk to me – and to ask me something.’

‘So it was really her?’

‘Yeah.’