The text reads, Help us to find Holly Lawrence. My photograph appears too, with the words MISSING from St Ives, Cornwall, since June 2017, and a confidential telephone number. I remember when Zac took the picture, snapped in his garden in early spring of that year. My hair looks like copper in the sunlight – I’d almost forgotten what it was like before I dyed it, and how long it was. Now, it barely skims my shoulders. Then, it was halfway down my back. The top of my baby bump is visible. I was so happy, knowing she was inside me. So why do I look so sad and haunted in that shot? Nobody else has that image. There is no question that Zac put it on that site.

I smile at the man. ‘It’s not me. I hope I don’t look lost or missing, because I know exactly where I am.’

His response to my feeble joke is a half-hearted smile.

‘You’re good to be concerned. I hope she’s okay and that they find her – if that’s what she wants.’ I thank him and hand him the phone, then turn and walk quickly away, so his view will be of my retreating back. This should make it difficult for him to take a photo of me, if the idea occurs to him while in the throes of his civic-mindedness.

I cut to the side and out of the crowd of stallholders, rather than pushing through it, as confident as I can be that nobody is paying attention to me. This is the best I can do for now, though as soon as I can, I will get Maxine to take that photo down.

I find a public loo in a near-empty park, where I stuff my black-dyed hair beneath the hat, pull the hoodie over my running shirt, and shove my trainers in my backpack after slipping on the wellies. I study a map of the area before returning to the road where Maxine’s driver dropped her. I park one block down the hill from the house she entered.

I watch the rear of the house from the drizzle-damp fields behind it. I’m about to take my binoculars from my backpack and risk a quick look at the windows, but then I work out that they are made of privacy glass. This, more than anything, inclines me to think that she really does live here. Only someone as secretive as Maxine would deliberately blur their view of the Georgian town beyond these fields.