There is a kind of time delay before I manage to speak. ‘It has.’ Do I sound like a robot to them? ‘Thank you. I think I need to go home now. I need to sleep, and then see my grandmother.’

I drive away from George’s flat, but I don’t go home. I head for the botanical gardens in the middle of the town. I park under some hydrangeas, where pink and blue flowers are growing from the same bush, as if through some kind of genetic magic. I roll down the car window, in need of fresh air.

I think back to the nightmare of my time in hospital, and immediately afterward. They all told me I’d held my baby. That I spent hours with her. But I haven’t even a sliver of a memory of it. I think back to my certainty that she wasn’t dead, that she couldn’t be. They all thought it was my grief, the total mental collapse I was having, then.

I am trembling at the thought that I was right, and Zac somehow stole my baby, and bullied and blackmailed Eliza and Jane into helping him. Zac knows the medical world. He knows how hospitals work. He knows Frederick, who can manipulate data and documents and records. Is it possible that Zac could have pulled off such a thing? And that he and Jane persuaded her brother to delete any evidence that she was ever there? Given how much they sacrificed and suffered to help Frederick, it was hardly a big ask.

Even so, I still can’t fully understand why Jane would take such a risk. Love for Zac? Guilt about what she brought upon him? Fear, despite having escaped him? Montenegro isn’t a Category 1 country for extradition, which must have been Jane’s reason for choosing it, but it still would have been extremely dangerous for her to be discovered there.

I start the engine. I do not return to my grandmother. I whisper a small prayer of apology, a plea for understanding even though I know it won’t reach her. I head up to the motorway, towards Yorkshire.

Then
The Drowning Place

One year and ten months earlier

Cornwall, June 2017

My eyes were tightly closed against the grief that hit me like a tsunami and tossed me so far and deep I couldn’t fight it. I opened them to see a shadow figure, sitting by the bed, watching me. She’d arrived in silence, and at first I thought she was a ghost, or part of the bad dream that continued whether I was asleep or awake.

‘Holly,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to wake you. I thought I’d wait.’