Helen sat down on a vast square chocolate-brown suede sofa near the hotel lift. Its seats were too deep for her to be able to lean against the back of it, not without her legs sticking straight ahead of her like a child’s. So she perched on the edge and waited, her palms flat on her knees to try and stop them trembling. She was five minutes early, and still not entirely sure why she was there.

That moment, up in the attic, when she had found the photographs . . . it had been unreal. Like she had suddenly developed Alzheimer’s or something – just utter, total incomprehension.

She had climbed gingerly across the exposed beams of the loft, yellow loft insulation covering the floor between the beams like mashed potato on a pie – boarding it up had been on Sean’s To Do list for years now – over to the box of Frankie’s paintings that Sean had chucked to the back of the attic next to a baby car seat and another box containing her wedding dress. The boxes bobbed about on the sea of insulation like cargo out of a sinking ship.

She’d crouched down on her haunches and opened the box, flicking through them all, but nothing else had leaped out at her, no more ‘naps’, no more faces peering through windows.

She had been folding the flaps of the box back in, and about to swing her legs through the loft hatch to descend the ladder again, when the corner of something unfamiliar had caught her eye. It was a photograph album, one she didn’t recognize, almost completely hidden by the insulation. She pulled it out and opened it up curiously – and thought she was about to have a heart attack.

Sean had always told her that he’d got rid of all the photos of his ex-wife Penny after she died, that it was ‘just too painful’ to keep them. Of course it was possible that he had overlooked this one album, had forgotten he’d stuffed it under the insulation, perhaps to spare Alice from hurt – although no, that was bollocks. Helen herself had heard Alice expressing sorrow to Sean that she didn’t even have any photographs of her mum, and Sean apologising.

No, what was absolutely, blood-drainingly even more inexplicable than the continuing existence of this album of pictures of Sean and a woman who, at the age she was in the photos, bore a startling resemblance to Helen herself, laughing and kissing and then, later, holding the bundle that was baby Alice – was that Sean’s supposedly dead wife was her own friend, Marion. The woman she’d trained and chatted with at the gym, the woman she’d almost confided in about her sex life. She’d only known ‘Marion’ for a few months, but had quickly come to think of her as one of her best friends.

What a mug.