Relief washes over her face. ‘Are you sure? I don’t want you to feel unwelcome.’

‘You’ve made me very welcome.’

‘He’s so – concerned – about my having friends. I think – I get the feeling maybe his previous girlfriend had friends who came between them. I know he wants the best for me and Alice.’ She is ten years older than I am, but suddenly looks ten years younger, and so vulnerable.

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’ Now the words are a happy chant, a game, each one stabbing me in the chest.

‘I’m sure he does.’ I kiss Eliza’s cheek, then the wriggling Alice’s, and make my voice light. ‘I’ll meet Zac when the time is right. I can see myself out – you have your hand full.’

I practically fly down the stairs, cursing my shoes for squeaking, my heart pounding each time a foot hits the marble. When I get to the heavy front door, I can’t figure out how to unlock it, and I struggle for what seems like minutes but is probably seconds, my hands slippery with sweat, so this feels even more nightmarish, and my breathing comes still faster. At last, miraculously, the knob turns and I jerk the door noisily open, taking a quick look over my shoulder as I step into the sunlight, half-expecting a monster to be chasing me. But there is nothing.

I rush along the gravelled drive, only to find that the black iron gates are closed. I let out a cry of despair, and decide I have no alternative but to climb them. I have both feet on the horizontal rail that runs a metre above the ground, linking the posts, and I’m trying to work out how I will manage to clear the spearheads that decorate the top, when there is a click and the gates start to swing open with me clinging on. Eliza must have realised I’d be trapped here, and pushed a magic button somewhere inside. I jump down, stepping quickly out of the path of the slow-moving gate. Then I slip through the gap and walk away as fast as I can without drawing attention to myself, though what I want to do is run.

Then
A Meeting

Two years and one month earlier

Cornwall, Late March 2017

The day we returned from London, I placed an announcement in the ‘In Memoriam’ section of the newspaper. I typed it all out on a burner phone with Internet access that I’d hidden behind the air vent in the bathroom. I named my fictional dear-departed Heidi Keyes Greenwood. My message read, I miss you every day. All I want is to see you again.