I don’t want it to be true, but I do remember. That medical conference Zac went to a couple months before he made me pregnant. Did he meet Jane there? It would have been a relatively safe place for her. Like Montenegro, it doesn’t extradite as easily as EU countries. That must have been when Zac and Jane conceived Alice. ‘Yes.’

I glimpse a spider moving through the grass. I think of how a spider carries her silken egg sac beneath her belly. What determination must a spider have to drag something so much bigger than she is? If she can do that, I can do this. I force my head into movement once more, to watch Eliza, to convey sympathy. ‘You loved Jane.’ There is a hammer in my skull.

‘I did.’ Eliza begins to sob. ‘She knew I couldn’t have a child.’

‘She loved you too.’

‘Yes. Yes, she did. She was going through so much herself with her marriage. And the IRS. I wanted to die when I found out I couldn’t have a baby, but Jane helped me through.’

It is as if I have a kaleidoscope behind my eyes, and each time I manage to alight on a distinct picture, it dissolves into mess. But I see the pact Eliza and Jane must have made, with Eliza faking a pregnancy and Jane hiding her own. They had to trust each other. They each had so much to lose.

Eliza hits the top of her left wrist with the fingers of her right hand, again and again, a series of sharp smacks that seem to be slapping away inside my own head. ‘Jane didn’t want Zac to have Alice when she found out he was expecting a baby with you.’

I remember a trip Zac made when I was ten weeks pregnant. That was to the Ukraine, another country that is a lighter touch than most when it comes to extradition, especially when Jane had her brother’s help with altering databases and interfering with surveillance measures. Did Zac meet Jane there to break the news about me and our baby? Was that when she decided to keep Alice a secret from him, and give her baby away? She must have been starting to show by then, a couple months ahead of me, but she was so slight – she could have covered it up.

I realise Eliza must have been wearing a prosthetic bump when she met Zac in that London hotel. She deliberately led him to think she’d been abandoned by her partner. Zac had no clue that he had two babies on the way, then. I’m struggling to make my brain compute this new reality – Zac had told me the truth about Eliza and Alice. He’d just omitted the pact Eliza and Jane had made, which he’d discovered when Eliza turned up on his doorstep with Alice.