I couldn’t keep everything straight in my head. I kept coming back to the one thing I knew for sure: someone at the shelter had sold my story to the press. I believed Marilyn when she said that she would never do such a thing. So someone else then. One of the interns? It had to be. I ran through them in my head. Katrin, who I’d caught trying to take a picture of me? Or one of the boys, Tom and Callum: the confident, tall one, or the shyer one who was so good with the dogs? Had one of them recognised me too, realised I was Casey Adams and sold my story to the press, outed me? Just for money? I wondered how old the boys were. Nineteen, twenty?

Carson’s age. My heart stilled for a second. Carson was in England and he was the same age. It didn’t seem possible. Could one of those boys – the boys I had walked past for weeks and barely looked at, those hulking boys so much younger than me – could one of them be Carson? The sweet baby I’d held in my arms, whose life I had saved? Had he come to find me? But that wasn’t a good thing. Raised by his aunt, he probably thought I’d murdered his family, his parents and his sister. Why else had he come, if not for revenge? But which boy was Carson? Tom or Callum? I had to find out.

Getting out of bed, I got dressed in jeans and a jumper, put on tennis shoes and my coat. Gently, I eased the door of the flat open and looked up and down the corridor. No one. I went to the front door, with its depressing reinforced glass, and peered out to the street. There was no sign of anyone in a car watching me, but I knew they would be there somewhere. I went back inside, down the stairs to the basement of the building. Down there was a kind of laundry room, warm and smelling of damp and detergent. There was also a window, and I sucked my stomach in tight, grateful for the stress-induced weight loss of the last week, and squeezed through it, banging my knee on the frame. I landed awkwardly on top of a bin outside, getting a wet mark on my jeans. I closed the window most of the way, hoping no one would notice, and snuck down the alley between the houses. Out front, I could see the unmarked police car, the officer inside looking at his phone and eating a pasty. It was fine. I’d be in and out in an hour, tops. Then I cut through the town and down towards the shelter.