And all I could think was, tonight is my last night of freedom.

The doorbell rang. My heart leaped. Danny’s final words stayed with me however hard I fought them. ‘I’ll find you, I promise.’ That tiny shred of hope still flickered then, despite my flat despair.

I heard voices, excited, and then my father called out, ‘James is here. Daddy’s home.’ The kids stood as one, screaming with excitement and confusion, and went running inside, tumbling over one another to reach their father first, my mother’s dog barking in frenzy.

For a moment I didn’t get up. I looked down at my hands, at my wedding ring, and I saw the storm clouds reflected in my teacup.

We went back to the perfect house in the country. All this time I had been running, and now I saw there was nowhere left to go. The children were happy here, settled – and I was about to pull their life apart again. For years I had been championing the outsider without realising that I was deliberately making myself one, and slowly I’d begun to realise, too, that it wasn’t the place as much as me. I was rejecting safety, not location. And my children needed safety; so here, for now, we would stay. It finally felt more like coming home; and although we wouldn’t stay in this house, the children and I would stay in the Cotswolds.

From the day we arrived back in Gloucestershire, James and I slept in separate bedrooms. He threw himself into his work and I prevaricated about telling him that one of us had to go. It bubbled unsaid beneath the surface: I figured I’d wait until the end of the long summer holidays, then at least the children could have some time as a family before it was finally torn asunder.

James was different, humbled perhaps. I felt that he too knew that it wasn’t going to work, but he wasn’t going to be the one to broach it. We skirted round the subject of his guilt; I built myself up to confront him finally about it.

And then one morning the phone rang.

‘Let’s just say you’ve got a special friend, darling,’ a woman’s voice said quietly, giving me a time and place to meet. I thought I recognised her but before I could question her, she had hung up.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness
has not overcome it.

John 1:4, 5

All the way to London, the woman’s words circled round my head like carrion crows. She’d hung up before I could ask more; that silky voice echoing down the years, a voice I was sure I knew and yet couldn’t quite place. One more piece from the nightmare jigsaw the last year had become; one more piece nearly slotted back in.