I watched the car disappear out of sight, fantasising that I would get out my journal and write. Instead, I wandered through the house nibbling a special ginger biscuit that was supposed to help with nausea but was proving useless. I was ten weeks pregnant but the sickness wasn’t getting any better.

Zac hated clutter, but this place was decorated in a romantic style that seemed to invite it. The personal things were all mine – the cardigan thrown over the cabbage roses sofa, the pregnancy magazines covering the distressed coffee table, the pot of lip gloss and ponytail holder on the white-painted chimney piece, the novels on the chintz armchair. Zac was constantly putting them away, then scrubbing the artificially aged surfaces with disinfectant wipes. I was trying to be more orderly, because it was painful to see him so unnerved by what he would call mess and I would call the ordinary chaos of human life.

Since Maxine’s ambush on the cliffs two months earlier, I’d stepped up my efforts to search the house for some sign of Jane. I poked my fingers into the toes of Zac’s socks when I tossed the clean pairs into the drawer. I ran my hand under the mattress when I made the bed. I examined the seams of his suits when I hung up his shirts from the dry cleaners. I checked his books as I dusted, to see if any were mere shells with cavities for hiding things. So far, I had found nothing. His taste in books, all hardbacks and dust-free, was unsurprising – medical ethics, law, artificial intelligence, and the surveillance state. He especially liked it when these subjects intersected. His current book at bedtime was about the use of technology by a group of anonymous hackers to promote political and social change.

As I closed the lid of a shoebox that lived in his wardrobe – it contained a pair of unworn black Oxfords – I had a flash of Zac loading a new carbon-fibre suitcase onto the passenger seat of his sports car. Everybody saved their old suitcases for packing stuff when they moved, didn’t they? Before I had finished this thought I was rushing down the stairs to the cupboard that runs beneath them.

My own suitcases were towards the front. I’d used them to transport my stuff from what I referred to as the brown house. My attic bedroom, with walls that I’d painted all the colours of the rainbow, was the one exception to the law of brown. The rest of the house was filled with brown carpets that my grandmother vacuumed every day, brown tapestry curtains that I was always opening and she was always closing, and brown sofas covered in bobbled brown blankets that I was always tearing off and she was always putting back. ‘I don’t want my fine furniture destroyed by the sun,’ my grandmother would say.