“It was. I knew she didn’t really want me there. I think it made me uncertain about my place in the world generally. I was never very confident. At school, I was never part of the cool crowd. I worked hard at being accepted both at home and at school. I was afraid to be myself.” Flora paused. “Izzy was right about that. Sometimes I do try too hard. And I can’t believe I just told you all that.”

“Well as we’re both being honest here I can tell you that I wasn’t part of the cool crowd either. I was impossibly shy and socially awkward.” She met Flora’s surprised gaze and felt an unexpected connection.

“You?”

“Oh yes.” Clare laughed. “School was pretty much a nightmare for me until the day Becca arrived. My parents weren’t wealthy. I didn’t have the right clothes. I didn’t speak the right way. I didn’t have a pony. But then along came Becca, and after about two days she was the coolest girl in the school.”

“She had wealthy parents and a pony?”

Clare looked at her curiously. Didn’t she know? Had Jack not talked about her at all? “Becca was raised in the foster system. She didn’t know anything about the right clothes or the right way to speak, but she didn’t care. She was so wild, she was cool. The coolest girl in school. She didn’t care about pleasing people.” She scraped the mushrooms into a dish and slid them into the oven to keep warm. “But she had one exceptional talent. She could dance. Other girls did ballet because their parents had signed them up, but Becca did it because she loved to dance. I think she found it to be the purest way of expressing herself. But when she wasn’t dancing, she was disruptive, daring and—”

“—exciting to be around.”

“Yes, I suppose she was sometimes. And sometimes it was stressful being around her.” Clare topped up Flora’s coffee mug, and then did the same with her own. The atmosphere had shifted from stilted to companionable. “She pushed me out of my comfort zone and in turn I think I gave her some of the stability she’d never had. She saw what a family could be.” She’d never talked about Becca like this, not with her mother, not even with Todd. She’d said more to Flora about Becca in the last five minutes than she had to her own family in the past year. To Flora! Who probably couldn’t bear to hear Becca’s name. “I can’t believe I just talked nonstop about the one subject you probably don’t want to talk about.”

“Actually it was helpful. I need to hear about her. It might help me understand the children a little more. They were obviously a perfect family.”