He doesn’t turn to go. Instead, he waits in the doorway until she draws closer and then he steps into the corridor and gestures for her to go first. As she walks through the corridor, past the kitchen area and into the living room Fran digs desperately in her bag. There’s so much stuff in it, so much unnecessary crap, and her fingers slide over pens, notebooks, packs of tissues, a comb, receipts, coins, but not her phone.

‘Take a seat.’

She jumps, knocking her knee against the side of the armchair. The bag flies out of her arms and hits the rug, spewing its contents all over the ground.

‘I’ll get that for you.’

As Fran stands beside the armchair, her knee pulsing, her heart racing, Damian drops to his knees and scoops her notebooks, her pens, her tissues, her comb and her phone and drops them back into her bag.

‘Take a seat,’ he says again, and she does.

He places the bag on the ground beside her then sits down on the sofa. Fran looks at the bag. Is it a trick? If she reaches for it will he know she’s going for her phone? Should she ignore it? Play along?

‘So.’ Damian leans forward, his forearms on his knees. ‘Finally, just you and me, all alone.’

Fran nods but says nothing. She’s trying to read his expression but his features contradict each other: his brow’s rumpled and his eyes are dark and serious but there’s the hint of a smile playing at the edges of his mouth.

‘You all right, Fran?’

Her lips part then close again. ‘You called me Fran.’

‘That’s your name isn’t it? Fran Fitzgerald?’

‘Yes,’ she says warily. ‘Yes it is.’

‘Where is everyone?’

She casts her eyes over the furniture and around the room as though one of the other guests might suddenly pop up from behind an armchair. Not because she thinks they might be there but to buy herself time to think, to work out how she’s going to get out alive.

‘No idea,’ she says and then, because she’s still play-acting that everything’s normal, ‘I thought you might know.’

He shakes his head lightly. ‘I got up late and they’d all buggered off. I thought maybe I’d missed the activity or something. I drove over to the adventure place in the woods but they said no one had turned up.’

‘Oh.’

‘So where are they? Where is everyone?’