I’m far from drunk, but the booze is fuelling my emotions. I desperately want – no, need – to see more photos from the past. I rise. Most of the family albums are in Mum’s old workroom. I make my way upstairs.

Within moments of stepping into her room, I know I shouldn’t be here, encased in this shrine to Mum. The neatly made bed where she spent her final weeks; the boxes of brightly coloured ribbons, silk flowers, and rolls of cellophane that are piled high on a pine table, the pretty curtains at the window, all nudge at my already fragile state.

I take a breath, kneel down, and pull out an album, then another, flicking through the pages at speed, as though searching for something I can’t find, my emotions chaotic.

It’s as I give up my search and thrust the albums back onto the shelf that I see it: a thick, pale-blue notebook, with the words Caroline’s Journey written on the cover in Mum’s swirling, curling handwriting. I’ve seen it before on her bedside table a few days before she died.

I pick it up, clasp it tight against my chest, and leave the room.

Back on the sofa downstairs, tears stream my face as I read from the pages, all written in Mum’s beautiful hand. Her thoughts and deepest fears all there in front of me, telling me how much she struggled through the awful disease, whilst putting on a brave face for the world – for us – for me.

It’s when I come to the pages she wrote when we visited Drummondale House – the night Lark and Jackson disappeared – that my tears stop, and my anxiety heightens.

I woke. Jackson wasn’t beside me. I don’t know what made me get up and leave Bluebell Cottage to try to find him. Maybe I knew deep down. Maybe I’d always known.

But I wish I hadn’t gone into the wood.

I didn’t take a torch, as the moon was so bright that night. I saw the masks first – six of them, hanging in the trees. I’d shuddered, was tempted to turn back, but then I heard it – the sound of lust, betrayal – and my blood ran cold.

I continued towards the sound. I shouldn’t have. The sight of Jackson and Rosamund – so crude, basic, like animals – will stay with me until I die.

I thought he loved me.

I thought she was my friend.

I close the book, my heart thudding. Jackson was having an affair with Rosamund. Jackson was having an affair with Rosamund. Oh God, my poor mum discovering them. My poor, poor mum.

But why hadn’t she said anything?