‘Is someone going to jail, Mammy?’ she’d asked, sliding down the stairs one at a time on her bottom and looking at me with trembling lips.

‘No, pet. No one’s going to jail. These lovely police officers are just taking these flowers to give them to someone who doesn’t have any. Sure, look at us, we’ve two bunches.’

She might only have been three, but she was a smart kid and the look she gave me screamed ‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying, Mum.’

‘They need to be careful not to squish them,’ she’d said solemnly as they were slid inside an evidence bag. ‘Nobody wants squished flowers. You always have to be careful ’cos the petals can fall off and the flowers get broken. You can’t fix flowers with glue, Mammy. You told me that before.’

I nodded, lifted her up into my arms. ‘That’s right. You smart cookie.’

She was in bed now. Beth sat at the other end of the sofa to me. She’d been clingy; not disappearing to her room as she normally did or asking to meet her friends in the park. Instead, she was lost in the world of Snapchat. I was staring aimlessly at the TV but nothing was going in.

I looked at them both, my family. I’d die for Beth, I knew that. For Molly, too. I’d do whatever I needed to protect them. At one stage I’d been sure I’d die for Paul as well, and him for me. Would I still? Would he want me to? Would he care if I’d been the one found lying on the side of the road and not Clare?

I chided myself. Of course he’d care. He wasn’t a bad man. I’m sure it would hurt him; but would he be driven mad with grief for me? I doubted it. That made me so incredibly sad. Could I pinpoint where it had started to go wrong? I wasn’t sure there was one event, one cataclysmic explosion of something that broke us. I think we’d just been chipped away at over the years.

We were very good at pretending, though – we could act the part. We could act the part so well that sometimes I wondered if I was acting at all. Sometimes I believed my own hype and a surge of hope that we could save what had resurfaced, but it was never long before old patterns re-emerged.