Lisa would help make sense of it all, but Maddy can’t reach out to her. Lisa’s deception still stings too much. The fact that she knew about Trent’s affair with Helen feels too huge a betrayal. Because she must have known all the details. All the dates, all the … wait … holidays? Maddy can’t help raking over the past for evidence, feeling a jolt each time she thinks of a new moment that she must have been lied to about – like Trent’s golfing trips. How he used to tell her every boring detail so that she tuned out … as he knew she would. And she remembers too, at the golf club dinner – how Trent’s friends were always so charming towards her. Had they known that he was cheating on her? One man – Geoff – sticks in her mind. How he made a joke she hadn’t understood and Trent had brushed over it.

With a little distance, she can see that maybe the signs were there, but she’d deliberately ignored them. Maybe it was to do with her menopause, or just that she and Trent had got too used to each other and he’d got bored. But it’s so hard to untangle it all and her feelings about her marriage and Jamie without feeling floored by helplessness and shame.

It doesn’t help that it’s already a fortnight into a new year and she’s drawn a blank on her hunt for Jamie. She’s starting to think that maybe he’s changed his name. Or maybe he’s not even living here. Maybe he’d just been passing through at Christmas. She’s taped a hundred ‘missing’ posters to lamp posts around the town and in the phone box from where Jamie made the call on Christmas Day. She’s shown his photo in every shop and to practically everyone she’s met, but … nothing.

She’s just taping a laminated photo to the graveyard’s notice board, when she notices a woman smiling at her. She’s the one with the two boys who have gone off around the looping path on their skateboards and she’s coming towards her by the gate. They must be about nine and eleven, Maddy thinks, staring wistfully at the boys. They both have a mop of black hair and are clearly brothers. The older one is tall and gangly and she can remember Jamie at exactly that age. How he grew suddenly, sprouting legs and hair overnight. She remembers too, what a ninja he was – how sure-footed and daring. He’d had no fear, just complete confidence in his physical abilities.

‘Oh,’ the woman says, ‘you were the lady on the beach. I recognise the dog.’

Maddy is startled. She doesn’t know anyone here, apart from Matteo, so it feels odd to be recognised.

‘Oh, Luna, yes.’ Maddy remembers the woman, recognising her Irish accent. She’s wearing a pink woolly coat and the wrong shade of lipstick, and her smile is friendly. She looks expectantly at Maddy.

‘I was so impressed you went in,’ Maddy says. ‘I thought it was nice you had a gang.’