“Jess! If you’ve fixed that socket, can you come back down? I want to check on something for Monday’s shoot.”

Jess stole one last glance at her sister’s face, wondering how Lily managed to sail through life as though she had nothing to hide, nothing to feel guilty for, wondering whether her sister had managed to convince herself of her innocence or whether she was content living with the knowledge of the damage she had done.

A scene flashed into Jess’s head, flickering in her mind like an old Super-8 film: standing outside the spare bedroom, looking into Lily’s eyes and knowing what must have taken place behind that door, yet being too weak—too afraid, too overwhelmed—to raise the alarm.

“Jess! Can you come back down?”

Jess blinked away the image of Lily with her hands clasped around the door handle, breathed against the persistent memory of all that had happened later that day and all that had come after. Swallowing against the regret and the grief catching in her throat, she switched off her phone and traipsed back down the stairs.

Chapter 3

Lily

Laughter pealed from the far end of the table and Lily wondered what joke she’d missed. She passed the prosecco bottle to Pippa without filling her glass and sipped her mineral water, glancing at her phone for the second time in as many minutes, wondering how soon she might be able to escape.

“So, has Phoebe signed up for the China trip? Honestly, how lucky are our girls? In our day no one went further than France on a school trip. Clementine is so excited. She’s done nothing but read up on Chinese history for the past two weeks. I’ve booked her a Mandarin tutor but I don’t know how much she’ll pick up in eight months.”

Lily racked her brain for any mention of a school trip to China. She was sure she’d remember if Phoebe had told her but had no recollection of it. “Yes, it sounds amazing. I don’t think Phoebe’s decided yet. When’s the deadline?”

“Monday, so she’d better get her skates on if she wants to go. It does sound marvelous. I said to Tom that perhaps he and I ought to go to China, but he said that if he’s only got seven weeks’ annual leave, he’d rather spend them in a place he knows and likes rather than risk ending up somewhere dreadful. Honestly, he’s so unadventurous. Sometimes I think I should just pack up and head off somewhere exotic like that woman in Eat, Pray, Love.”

Lily tried to picture Pippa’s husband, but men were so rarely expected to get involved in school-related social activities that they all morphed into one nebulous mass in her head. She glanced around the table at the group of mums she’d first met six years ago when Phoebe had started secondary school and with whom she’d dutifully been attending a termly get-together ever since. She knew some of the other mums met more regularly, that they had an encyclopedic knowledge of each other’s lives, but then, some of these women hadn’t worked for as long as Lily had known them.