She digs her shoe into my hip and the pain shakes me and shakes me and shakes me some more, jetting up into my head and down to my ankle. But it wakes me too.

‘We weren’t,’ I say. ‘I’m your friend.’

‘You aren’t. You avoided giving me your number until two days ago. But I know how to defeat a phone passcode. I’ve broken into Zac’s so many times.’

I try to think when she could have done this. I must have left my phone in my bag when I pretended to go to the loo so I could snoop around her house. That was how she got my number and dialled it while I waited in front of Maxine’s house in Cheltenham.

I am grappling to remember something important I wanted to ask her. ‘Frederick.’

She looks genuinely confused. ‘Who’s Frederick?’

‘My head.’ My brain is like a sheet of glass, spiderwebbing before it shatters.

‘For the best? Is that what you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘I did. I made the best decision I could. I’d always loved Zac. And he was Alice’s father. I was able to give him his child. That was the right thing to do, once you were gone. I told him what Jane and I had done – he immediately understood why.’

Something pings for me, and I work hard to form another thought through the haze. The thought is that Eliza doesn’t know about Frederick. Jane told her some of the truth, but probably only the IRS part of it. She didn’t talk about her brother and what he did, or what she and Zac helped him to do. Eliza doesn’t know the real reason Jane was in hiding.

‘Family. You gave. Alice.’ My words are no longer coming in the right order.

‘Zac was still in mourning for you and your baby – he was so lost.’ A shadow passes over her face. ‘I wanted my marriage with Zac to be a real marriage.’ What she says next comes out strangled. ‘We were one hundred per cent together when it came to Alice, but he wouldn’t even sleep with me – he said it wouldn’t be fair. That was the deal.’

She lied that he hurt her. She pretended to fear him.

‘No better way to get a man to love you forever than to run away from him.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘I was too late to that lesson, but you and Jane were born knowing it.’

At last, I understand why Jane took such a huge risk in returning to the UK. It was her longing for Alice. She couldn’t live with the choice she’d made.

‘I don’t. You. Blame.’

‘Jane can’t just change her mind like that and ask for Alice, can she?’

‘No.’ This is an easy word.