Jenna doesn’t reply. Instead, she opens the bag and tips the mobile towards her so only she can see the screen.

Twenty-one missed calls since she left Britain.

She turns the phone off.

Chapter 6

Now

KATE

Tom’s black mood has filled the small flat like smoke. There isn’t a single room where Kate can draw breath without tasting his anger. It’s been five days since she posted the tweet and neither of them have had much sleep – not Kate in the bed and not Tom on the sofa. The first forty-eight hours were the worst. Journalists targeted their phones and then, when they turned them off, the doorbell. There is no doorbell now. Tom ripped it off the wall.

Kate sits on the bed staring at the long list of Google alerts for Tom’s name. She’s read dozens of news articles, hundreds of Twitter comments and as many emails as she can stomach but the SoulShrink email inbox has thirty-seven unread messages, all sent in the last seventy-two hours and all marked urgent. Her own email address has been targeted too, as has her Facebook account, Instagram, Twitter and even her long-abandoned LinkedIn account. Everyone wants to talk to Tom – newspapers, magazines, breakfast shows, news programmes and documentary makers. And the requests aren’t just coming from inside the UK. The German, Spanish, French, Maltese and American press are bombarding them too. The senders of the emails are trying every trick in the book to get Tom to talk to them: ‘we want you to tell your side of the story’, ‘we’re sympathetic to what you’ve been through’, ‘this is your opportunity to let the British public know that you’re as much of a victim as the people who died.’ Kate shuts her laptop, puts it on the bed beside her and drops backwards, arms spread, and stares at the ceiling. She knew this would happen; she factored it into her plan. What she didn’t anticipate was Tom’s flat-out refusal to talk to anyone. Why did she jump the gun and send that tweet without talking to him about it first? Why? She presses her hands to her face and breathes noisily through her nose. Because she’s spent the best part of two years dreaming about restarting their lives and she couldn’t wait a second more. And now she’s screwed it all up.

‘Kate?’ She hears the floorboards creak under the thin carpet. ‘We need to talk.’

She shakes her head, her hands covering the tears running down her temples into her hairline.

‘We can’t carry on like this.’ She feels the mattress shift under her husband’s weight as he sits on the edge of the bed. ‘Kate, look at me.’