Saskia pauses, her expression morphing from guilt to sympathy. ‘There’s nothing wrong with having a past, you know,’ she starts. ‘I take it you were visiting someone from your past in Reading? Was it family? You know, being born with a silver spoon isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, there’s nowhere to go but down. Coming from nothing, achieving all this.’ Saskia lifts one arm and wafts it around the room. ‘You should feel proud, not embarrassed.’

Saskia is the worst of them all. A fucking hypocrite, slagging off Mark and Kat for stalking Beth when she’s doing the exact same thing. And now she has this knowledge, the power to destroy Beth. Will she tell Simon? The girls? And who does she mean by family? She can’t know that Beth’s parents are alive.

Can she? Has she somehow used her journalist nose to sniff out the truth?

This is all too much. Kat could be out there, prowling around, and now Saskia has the tools to expose her too. But Beth can’t cause a scene, not when her whole life is teetering on the edge of some fatal abyss. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asks suddenly. Time to herself in the kitchen, a moment to breathe. ‘Shall I get us something to eat?’

Saskia takes another gulp. ‘Lovely,’ she says, with a relieved smile, so quick to assume she’s been forgiven. Saskia always looks at ease, Beth realises, as though the cotton wool of privilege not only softens, but also obscures what normal people fear. She pushes off the sofa and walks out of the living room, pulling the door tightly closed behind her.

Beth opens the fridge door, but even with the food in neat rows, the garish Christmas packaging overwhelms her, and she pushes it closed. A loud rustle from outside startles her and she twists round to face the wide glass doors, but there’s just blackness. A pigeon or fox?

Or Kat, waiting for her chance to break in?

Perhaps she should want it, Beth thinks. A showdown, winner takes all. But of course that’s crazy; that’s not who she is. She’s measured, careful. She acted on impulse with that stinking drug addict, and that’s when everything started to go wrong. She needs to be smarter now.

Beth spots the expensively wrapped box that arrived in the post a few days ago, a batch of Simon’s mum’s mince pies. It’s a Christmas tradition that has always irritated Beth, why Mary has to use such excessive decoration when she’s just following a widely used recipe from Bake Off, but it does seem like the most appropriate treat for this evening.