Well, I wasn’t at all sorry now that I’d frightened him once in a while. Served him right. I only wished I’d frightened him a whole lot more. The lying, cheating…

My hands tightened on the letter. It was an effort to relax them enough to keep the paper from creasing.

Jenny went on to have another daughter with her husband: Ellie, now eleven years old. Jenny’s marriage broke up when Ellie was a baby and ended in divorce.

Jenny wasn’t all that perfect, then. She was divorced, too. I shouldn’t have taken any satisfaction from this, but I was meanly pleased by it.

Following his divorce from you, Mark made contact with Jenny and they quickly became close. They are engaged to be married in the summer, and she is due to give birth to their second child shortly before Christmas.

There is no need to respond to this letter in any way. I’m sure you will appreciate that Mark is preoccupied with his new family, and I am getting in touch only to pass on information that might be relevant to you, given how surprisingly small the world can be. You might be interested to know that they plan to settle in Fairmarsh.

I hope you are able to find it in your heart to wish them all well.

Yours sincerely, Ingrid.

How many drafts of this letter would Ingrid have written, lining up the bombshell news ready to drop? But then, she’d probably loved it. Best fun she’d had in ages.

It had been two years. Two years of silence, and she hadn’t so much as mentioned Daisy, let alone asked after her.

I dropped the letter and slammed my fist into the palm of my hand.

‘Bitch!’

Daisy immediately let out a roar, scooped up one of her collection of diecast cars from the floor and hit the screen of the iPad with it. I dived forwards to stop her from hitting it again and was immediately plunged back into parental firefighting mode, and a present in which my former mother-in-law had no place, and nor did my ex-husband and his other family.

Twenty

Jenny

The sonographer ran the scanner over my big greased-up belly and said, ‘It’s definitely a boy.’

And there he was on the screen. His bones were like white shadows, hazy but easy to make out: the curve of the spine, the limbs, the skull. He looked like a fossil that had come to life.

He moved abruptly in response to the scanner, and my belly bulged and then subsided.

‘He’s got quite a kick,’ I said. I didn’t need to turn to Mark to know that he’d be grinning from ear to ear.

The baby kept moving. He was definitely going to be the splashiest swimmer in the pool when he was older. I imagined myself taking him into the water, encouraging him, gently letting him go so he could find out that he could float on his own. I hadn’t had much time for any of that with either of the girls.