It was a shock, and a rush of thoughts crowded my mind at the news, but I tried not to let it tell in my voice. ‘So it was this foreign man’s.’

‘No,’ he said. He sounded reluctant to speak. ‘It wasn’t. It was … It was someone else’s.’

The air felt thick. It seemed to weigh on me like in the hot moments before a storm, and I could feel something coming: a terrible knowledge. Words left my lips and I knew what they were, but I could hear them only from a distance. ‘Who was –’

He didn’t wait for the final sounds. ‘Nick’s. I think it was Nick’s.’

A fit of anger bucked through me. ‘No!’ I shouted. I just didn’t want it to be true. ‘It wasn’t!’ He made no reply. There was just the crackling on the line. My head was ready to crack in two. ‘Are you … Were they having an affair?’

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘But how do you know?’ I demanded.

A pause, and he replied quite simply. ‘She told me.’

‘So? She could be lying! She was always lying.’

‘I don’t think she was about them having an affair.’

‘Why?’

And then the final answer. ‘I called him. He didn’t even deny it.’ And that was it. I sank down.

What did I feel then? What was it that racked my body in that little call box for so long that Adam asked if I was still there? It wasn’t fury, or a sense of betrayal, that made me sob and then retch. It was loss, I think. Anger and hurt were there too, but it was the loss that left me unable to see anything but a blur in front of me, and the flesh of my wrist going white as I twisted the telephone cord around it in coil after coil.

When I had overheard Nick on the telephone to an unknown hollow and metallic voice, he had said that the drug, norethisterone, would have prevented Lorelei ending up ‘like she did’. I had presumed that referred to how she had died. But now I knew: he had meant it would have stopped her conceiving. I had no idea really if he had been using me to test that vile drug, but, somehow, even if he had, it was nothing next to this.

I breathed slowly and laboriously, like a hospital patient with infected lungs. ‘Did Nick know she was pregnant?’

‘I told him.’

There was a terrible pulsing in my head. It took me a while to speak again, as I tried to take in what he said and what it all meant – everything that had gone before, and everything that was still to come. ‘What was between them?’ I asked, keeping my voice as even as I could.