When Claire arrived in Moyross council estate and found her way to the part where piebald ponies and donkeys were tethered on the grass out front, she knew she was in the right place. She remembered the exact house number from visits with her parents when she was small. Her Milo cousins lived here. They were going to be startled to see her, she knew that, but she was going to tell them nothing of what had happened to her. She couldn’t speak of it, anyway. Couldn’t bear to. All she was going to say was that she had come travelling.

They would welcome her, she knew it. They saw little of each other, the Irish branch of the Milos and the English, but they were family, the door was always open. She didn’t want to put Mum, Dad or Trace at risk, so she would tell them she’d had a ruck with her folks and so please not to tell them she was here. They would respect that.

Before she turned up cold on their doorstep though, she supposed she ought to buy them a gift or two. She walked over to a row of shops and found an off-licence where she bought a bottle of brandy. In a sweet shop she bought sherbet lemons and flying saucers for any little ones, and for the lady of the house she bought a large box of milk chocolates.

Then she braced herself, somehow fixed a smile on her face, and started to walk back to the house, one of an identical row of pebble-dashed houses all squashed in together, side by side. She was about to cross the road when a taxi pulled up outside the house of her Milo cousins. She paused. In her mind flashed an image of Ciaran and Jeb Cleaver. They’d followed her. It was them.

Terror gripped her and she stopped dead in her tracks, her legs starting to shake. Then she turned and, trembling, struggling to breathe, she walked unsteadily to where she could take shelter among the other houses. She stopped there, her small suitcase and her shop purchases still in her hands, and peered around the corner.

It wasn’t the Cleavers.

It was Josh.