‘You’re my friend, Eliza.’ I try again to flex my bad foot, testing, but it does absolutely nothing.

‘Don’t. Don’t say that.’ She covers her eyes with her hands and sobs. ‘You’re the reason Zac made us move to Bath.’

When Eliza brought Alice to the hospital that first time, she must have guessed who I was before I’d even started to mop up her spilled coffee.

She is clenching and unclenching her jaw. ‘It’s your fault. It’s your fault Jane went there. It’s your fault she’s dead. I wouldn’t have had to do it if it weren’t for you. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. And now I have to do this too.’

‘You don’t.’

‘Zac didn’t know I knew.’ She is shaking her head, her eyes tightly shut. She sounds like a child chanting a nursery rhyme. ‘Not about you. He didn’t know I knew.’

When he came back early from his Edinburgh trip, Eliza wasn’t pretending to be terrified he’d find me there. The terror was real. But it wasn’t because she lived in fear of him. It was because she didn’t want him to discover the extent of what she knew about me. Perhaps Eliza is the best spy of us all.

I try again to lift my head, and I manage an inch or two, but it thwacks back onto the ground, rattling my brain against my skull. I drag my eyes to Alice. She hasn’t moved.

‘I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t I don’t I don’t. Oh God. I don’t.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I do. Zac would want to be with you. I’d lose Alice.’

‘Not to me.’ I see how terrifying it must have been for Eliza, imagining having to share Alice with a woman Zac loved more than her, though she couldn’t let herself see that there was zero chance of my ever wanting to be that woman.

She shakes her head again. ‘No. No no no no no. I was right. I was so angry when I phoned you on Monday and you said Zac’s name. You were expecting his call. You two were already talking behind my back, weren’t you?’

I remember Zac saying he didn’t leave the robin in front of my front door. He must have been telling the truth about that, too. It must have been Eliza, wanting me to hate him. She’d made a point of telling me Zac had been in Bath before he travelled to Edinburgh later that same day. She’d wanted me to realise he’d had the opportunity to leave me the robin.