‘Yes. When she was eighteen, I prayed that she would want answers, that we could sit down together and I could explain everything. I just wanted the chance to meet her, even if only once. It was so crazy: it started, quite literally, the moment I gave her away, the idea that I needed to explain why, that I needed to tell her that – despite what I’d done – I loved her. And that obsession with telling her, it would colour everything.’ Her voice had collapsed almost to a whisper, making it harder to hear now, even with the volume up. ‘I was born up here, but because my father was in the air force, we moved down south when I was two years old. So by the time he retired and decided to move us all back up to Yorkshire again, I was seventeen, and do you know what I kept thinking? I kept thinking, “How will Sophie be able to find me in Yorkshire?” I mean, it was a naive, childlike thought, but it would keep me awake at night. I had no idea where she was living, if she was even still in the London area, but that was what I was thinking: “How will she find me if I move counties? How will she find me up here?” In my teens, my twenties, it troubled me so much …’

Healy glanced at me.

I could almost see the gears cranking behind his eyes.

‘I’ve been so lucky in my life otherwise,’ the woman said, still wounded, still distressed, her words cut through with the weight of her history. ‘Well, for the most part. I mean, we all have our battles, don’t we? Life sometimes treats us in a way that isn’t fair. But I live in a beautiful part of the world and have neighbours I adore. I have a wonderful husband who I love. I have two amazing kids. But what I did to Beatrix, it kills me. I try not to show it in front of John, with Ian on Skype, when we visit Rina, but it cuts me so deep. I think sometimes it’s worse than the cancer.’

Healy glanced at me for a second time.

We’d both been wrong.

Because of the southern accent, because these meetings had taken place away from the village, because all the women in Black Gale, except Francesca, were born – and, we’d assumed, raised – up north, we’d thought that this woman was entirely new to us.

But she wasn’t.

She’d been right there all along.

It was Freda Davey.

46

‘Freda,’ Healy said softly, almost to himself.