Fran didn’t return to Caroline’s room after her session with Tom ended. Instead, she grabbed her coat from her room and took herself out to the field at the back of the house. Now she’s marching around the perimeter, stomping through the long grass, swinging her arms and gulping down big lungfuls of air. There was a point, during her one-to-one with Tom, when she thought her emotions might overcome her. In front of that fraud! Somehow he’d wrong-footed her, tricked her into opening up and all the while she thought she was the one with the upper hand; that if she gave him the emotional nugget he was so desperately digging for she’d be able to turn the tables and reflect the conversation back at him. But that hadn’t happened, had it? Instead of pressing him about Jenna’s disappearance, she’d ended up examining her own feelings about her sister. Not that she’d shared them with Tom. She’d acknowledged that, yes, she did feel regret in her chest then, having been instructed to sit with her eyes closed and her hands on her chest whilst mentally repeating ‘I forgive myself’, she’d worked through her feelings instead. And what confusing feelings they were. She’d agreed to go to the retreat because her mother had needled her incessantly. And she’d only stayed in the hope she would find proof that Jenna had killed herself and stop their mother from bringing it up every time they talked. Or were those really her motives? If what Tom was implying was correct then Fran wasn’t motivated by her own selfish needs. Rather, she was fuelled by anger and regret. She’d never bothered to get to know her sister and now she never would.

She could spend the rest of her life doing a double take when she saw women like Stella, the young woman from the tube, with a certain body shape and hair colour, because Jenna would never age. She’d never go grey, never wrinkle, never find sun spots on the back of her hands. She’d never move house or move jobs. Never travel, never fall in love. Never laugh or smile or hug. She’d remain frozen in time, like the photographs on Geraldine’s mantlepiece.