She doesn’t want to die. If she can live with the fact that her dad isn’t really her dad and she may never find out who is, she can live with the fact that Tom Wade is a liar and his wife is a blackmailer. What other secrets has Tom told Kate over the years? How many other people’s lives have they ruined?

Gulls dip and glide, still fishing in the last of the light, and shouts from the sweat lodge are carried to the cliffs on the wind. Jenna pulls her dressing gown tighter around her body. The other guests have shed the skin of their old lives like snakes and they’re celebrating the birth of a new future. Sorrow fills the well of her rage. She should be with them; excited, optimistic and fizzing with joy. When she lay in bed with Tom two days ago she’d seen their future shimmering like a mirage: a new start, a new life somewhere new. If she returns to London she has two options: confront her family about what she knows, or keep it to herself. She imagines going to work, visiting her parents at Christmas, the occasional awkward coffee with her sister. How can she continue to do those things, knowing what she does? She can’t step back into the life she had when the shadow of her secret will follow her everywhere.

What if she doesn’t return? What if she stays in Gozo or gets the ferry back to Malta? She could get a job in a bar or a restaurant, surround herself with strangers and create a new Jenna. She doesn’t need a sweat lodge to start a new life. But what she does need, she realises, her heart sinking lower than the sun, is money. She’s got two hundred euros in her purse. Even if she found a youth hostel on the mainland she wouldn’t be able to survive for more than four days, if that.

The shouts from the sweat lodge grow louder, then a scream cuts through the noise.

Jenna turns to see what’s going on and catches her breath. Standing a couple of feet in front of her, swamped in a dressing gown that’s so big the arms obscure her hands and the hood falls to just above her eyes, is her roommate.

‘Hello, Jenna,’ Erica says.

‘How are you, Erica?’ Jenna asks wearily. She’s really not in the mood to listen to her roommate gleefully warble on about what a transformative experience the sweat lodge was and how great she feels now.

Erica gives her a strange, twisted smile. ‘Renata.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s my new name. It means reborn.’