Audrey had not known it at the time, but her guilt was to be a storm that would rage for years to come, that would rise and fall with her moods, with the seasons, with the notable dates in the calendar that whipped it back into a frenzy.

Later that day—Audrey could never remember when exactly—she had gone downstairs to the kitchen with the policeman and policewoman and they had asked her questions she had discovered only later constituted her statement. She had given them only the bare facts—the usual timings of departures and arrivals, place of work, age, and health—but she had not dared tell them everything. It was too tortuous a tale and the repercussions had been too momentous, not just for her but for the girls too. But as soon as she had informed the police of what had happened in June—the parts she could divulge without any further incrimination—she had sensed them concluding that they had found their motive, had watched them close their notebooks on the case.

When the police had finally finished asking questions, she remembered unfurling her fingers to find deep indentations in her palms where her nails had dug into the flesh. As anonymous figures had bustled in and out of her house, Audrey had been aware of a gnawing dread that this was an experience from which her girls would never recover. She had not known it then but in the following years, as she had watched her family implode, she had suspected there had to be a link between Jess’s trauma at having discovered her father’s body and her decision to cut Lily out of her life. But Audrey had never been able to uncover what that link was or why Lily had borne the brunt of Jess’s rage.

Audrey looked out of the window onto the street below. She could feel Mia watching her, but however she rewrote the story of Edward’s death, there seemed to be no way to craft it into a meaningful synopsis. “It was a very hard time. That summer had already been so difficult and then losing Edward . . . I think it probably hit your mum worst of all.”

Audrey thought about how Jess had changed that summer: from an affectionate, carefree ten-year-old at the beginning to a watchful, angry eleven-year-old by the end.

“But before that, before Grandad . . . before he died, were you happy?”

Happy. Audrey repeated the word in her head, wondering if there were as many definitions of it as there were people on the planet.

She and Edward had argued so much in the months leading up to his suicide, arguments of such quiet ferocity that they had shifted the foundations on which their marriage had been built. So many times since, Audrey had imagined a parallel life, one in which she had chosen never to tell the truth. Because through whichever prism she viewed it, she could not escape the possibility that had she never told anyone what had happened, Edward might still be alive now.