‘I know,’ Beth spurts out, cutting the oxygen supply to her mum’s warning. ‘I will come, soon. I’m due a trip to the London office.’ She’s speaking without thinking now; she needs to stop but she can’t. Perhaps it’s seeing that man lying in the street, his dying on her. The way he died has brought back so many memories. Ugly ones, all the reasons she left. But also some happier ones from when she was younger, before everything went wrong. ‘I’ll come and visit you.’

‘Don’t leave it too long, dragă mea fiica. It’s important.’

My darling daughter. How can her mum describe her that way after she abandoned her parents so brutally? She knows why of course, what makes it impossible for them to give up on her. ‘I won’t,’ she hears herself whisper. ‘I promise.’ She clicks off the call, drops her phone and grabs the work surface to steady herself. The room is still spinning but she knows it will pass. That the anxiety will finally roll away, and she’ll just be left with the messy residue, like the disrupted sand after the storm has gone.

Messy questions like can she visit her parents without Simon or the girls getting suspicious? Can she sit in her parents’ sad front room – in the house she lived in for most of her childhood – and put on a good enough performance as a singleton in an Asian metropolis for them not to be suspicious? She and Simon lived in Singapore for nearly four years, so it’s easy to describe the shops and restaurants, the clubs that expat life centres around. And pretending to be a senior banker isn’t as hard as it should be – her parents have no context beyond the narrative she spins.

But how can she possibly hide that she’s a mother from the woman who gave birth to her?

She didn’t plan to tell so many lies. When Simon first asked about her parents, she didn’t have time to think things through, to assess the potential damage of their polarised backgrounds, so she told him they were dead. Before starting at Bristol University, she’d been living with her elderly aunt, her dad’s oldest sister, so it was easy to pretend she moved in with her after her parents suffered a tragic car accident. And lying to Simon about her parents meant lying to them about him. It was kinder than refusing to introduce him. She hadn’t considered what might come next. Living together, marriage, becoming a family. But the further she climbed into Simon’s life, the higher the stakes got. And the bigger the lies.