‘Your mother pushed me out of the way at her wedding. When the photographer was going to take the family portrait, and I was getting up to join them, she pushed me down into a chair by the top of my head. She said, “Not this one. We don’t want this one.” I cried to your father. He should have put his foot down with her from the start. But you are always on her side. Your father was too. No matter what horrible things she did.’

Nobody as sour as my grandmother can be trusted to impart a fair version of history. I found the wedding photo between the pages of my father’s copy of A Tale of Two Cities, on a shelf in his study. My grandmother is in it, in her full brown velvet glory, standing to my father’s right. He is in his uniform. My mother is on his left, wearing a halter-neck gown. It is simply cut of ivory silk and falls like water. Her amber hair is sprinkled with tiny white flowers, and drops in a sheet to several centimetres below her shoulders. We are so alike, she could be my twin. My father’s arm is around her, and the two of them are smiling on the church steps and leaning into each other. There is a small bump, interrupting the perfect column of my mother’s gown, so I am there too.

Perhaps my grandmother is thinking of that photo, not imagining I discovered it and have kept it near ever since, and that is why she comes out with her equivalent of an unexpected left hook. ‘What did you do with your baby?’ she says.

‘There is no baby.’ My voice cracks.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ But a part of me is not sure at all. It is as if a ghost baby follows me, not as she is in the one photograph I have from the day she was born, but seeming to go through every milestone, so that she is the age she would be now.

Zac’s child exactly matches the little girl I keep so close. Madly, I wonder if it was all a mistake, and Alice is mine. These are the thoughts I don’t confess to anybody, for fear they will lock me away, and I will have escaped one prison only to find myself in another.

‘Was there ever a baby?’ my grandmother asks.

I pause, feeling as if I have killed her all over again. ‘No.’

‘You sent that man again,’ my grandmother says. ‘He pretended to be nice but he wants to murder me.’

‘Nobody wants to murder you, Grandma.’

‘He does. The bad man from before. The one who scared me.’

I put my hand on her knee.

‘Ouch.’ She smacks my hand, hard.

‘Sorry.’ I loosen my grip. ‘What do you mean, the bad man from before?’