I log into an email account Maxine set up for emergency contact when I first moved to Bath. It will alert her as soon as I sign in. I find the Twitter post the stallholder showed me, and copy and paste the link into the body of an email.

But I can’t resist looking at it myself. The photograph is bigger on my laptop than the phone, so my baby bump seems more prominent. I close my eyes like a child frightened by a scary film. My breathing is fast and jagged, and I am crying. Quickly, trying to focus on the x in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, I close the window.

I write two short sentences to Maxine. Make this go away. Zac took the pic. Then I save the email to the drafts folder where Maxine will find it.

I plug Frederick Veliko’s name into every Internet search engine I can think of, as well as a variety of US government websites, as I did soon after Maxine first told me about him. My searches garnered so little, then. Now, there is nothing at all.

By the time I pull on to the tarmacked parking area in front of my grandmother’s nursing home, it is dark. Katarina is on night duty. She is my very favourite of everyone who works here, and my grandmother’s favourite, too – as far as my grandmother feels such things.

‘You look tired.’ Katarina hands me a pen and opens the visitors’ book.

‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’ I squiggle an illegible Helen Graham. ‘I promised her I’d come.’

‘No problem, Helen.’ Katarina leads me from the reception area to the day room. ‘She’s refused to go to bed. A part of her remembered . . .’

‘That’s good.’

My grandmother pretends not to notice when I come in. She is in her wheelchair, and alone. I drag across one of the many straight-backed blue wing chairs, which match the carpet. Before I sit, I kiss her powdery cheek. ‘It’s great to see you out of bed today, Grandma.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Holly.’

‘You’re late.’

‘It is so sweet, the way she calls you that,’ Katarina says.

‘It is.’ I don’t want to dwell on this. ‘Have you been waiting, Grandma?’ I’m filled with hope that she is tracking time.

‘Have you brought Princess Anne?’ my grandmother says.

‘Not today.’

‘I want to go home. Why have you forced me upcountry?’ My grandmother classes anything above Truro as upcountry.

‘To keep you near me. It wasn’t safe for you any more in the place you were before.’ I touch my grandmother’s hand, then toss a smile at Katarina as she slips from the room. ‘I miss home, too. I miss the sea.’ My grandmother was forever shutting windows and curtains, but maybe it was important to her simply to know the sea was there.