On the little bridge over the lake I stopped to watch the pelicans, who looked so venerable out on the fat rocks, bills resting on their plump chests. A tall couple in crackling anoraks handed me their camera, thanking me profusely in broken English. I took the picture and walked on, pausing beneath the frothing blossom trees in the sweet-scented air, in this oasis in the midst of all the fumes of London town. My mind was spinning fast as a Catherine Wheel.

If Xav refused to print it, perhaps I should write the story anyway: someone would want it, surely. It was my duty now to discern the facts – that’s all I could see. But I knew I was playing with fire. I thought about the children up at my mother’s house. This was the longest time I’d been away from them.

My phone bleeped. I didn’t recognise the number; the text message simply named a London hotel and asked me to come there in an hour, to tell Reception I had arrived.

I thought about how one day you don’t know someone and then the next, you meet and you can never go back, can never unknow them. I thought about the point at which our lives collide, like a great comet speeding across a huge sky, touching first one star, then immediately the next, connecting momentarily, arbitrarily – and then moving on. But that connection is indelible, even when it’s lost. It’s there for ever. Danny was in the forefront of my mind, but Maya and James were there too; and the tendrils of Society X were pushing their way up through the foundations of my life again.

I put the phone away and I walked on and on and on. The sky was so blue, a true blue, the clouds stacked and soft. I wanted to reach up and pull them down around me, hide away inside.

The past twenty-four hours had changed my life irrefutably, I knew that much. I couldn’t go back to how I was before. And I was too exhausted to go home.

I walked on into town.

The hotel on Charlotte Street was discreet and green, with flags waving gently in the breeze outside, a shiny receptionist and a busy restaurant full of women who wore sunglasses on the tops of their coiffured heads, and men in chinos. A note at Reception asked me to wait in the restaurant; I was shown to a table in the corner where I ordered juice and, realising I hadn’t eaten for a while, a scone with cream and jam.

I’d just finished it when a young slim girl wearing a beige headscarf and black trousers arrived at my elbow.

‘Rose Miller?’ She had a familiar look but I didn’t know her. ‘Please, would you come with me?’