‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘This is bullshit.’

I’d taken a seat in her living room while she got cleaned up, reappearing after a few minutes in fresh jeans and a T-shirt, her hair damp and smelling faintly of shampoo.

‘All right,’ she said, perching on the arm of her couch and looking at me. ‘Start from the beginning. What exactly did he write?’

‘That you had some spectacularly bad fights. He wrote that he got wound up enough that one time he hit you hard enough that you were knocked out cold.’

‘No,’ she said, her voice brittle, a wounded look in her eyes. ‘He would never have hit me, not in a million years. Sure, we argued sometimes. But never like what you’re describing.’

‘If you’d read his entries yourself,’ I said, ‘you’d have seen what he wrote.’

‘And I already told you why I didn’t. I was about ready to put them out of my sight by the time you got here.’ Her voice softened. ‘Look, maybe you’re right and I should have read them. What else did he say?’

I spread my hands. ‘Just domestic stuff. Picnics, up in the north of the island.’

‘Picnics?’ She laughed incredulously. ‘What picnics?’

I stood. ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘it’s time we both took a look at that diary.’

She looked uncertain for a moment, then pulled on a pair of boots before following me out the door and back to my own house.

I spread the notebook open on the counter of my kitchen and watched as Chloe flipped back and forth through the pages. She scanned crude illustrations of statues that filled a few pages in the later entries, peering at the dense scribble surrounding them.

She looked up at me, her expression bleak. ‘I swear on my life,’ she said, ‘none of this happened. Not any of it.’

‘So he was lying?’

‘All I’m saying is that none of this happened.’ When she looked at me, I could see how much strain all this was causing her. ‘What I don’t understand is, why the hell would he make all this up?’

Something occurred to me. ‘Just to be absolutely clear,’ I asked her, pointing at one of the illustrations, ‘you never visited the statues together either?’

‘Well . . . maybe a couple of times, early on. Years ago, really, not long after we got to know each other for the first time. But not recently. And sure as hell not for a fucking picnic,’ she snorted.

I tried to think of any reason why Chloe would be lying to me, but nothing would come to mind. Nor did I believe she was lying. I could see it in the lines of tension in her face, in the way she held herself. Her consternation and upset was palpably real. And yet, the seed of an idea was growing somewhere deep inside me.