She spent more of the holidays with Ethan, Claire and Maisie, either up in San Francisco or at home in her apartment, and she eventually gave up golf because of mild arthritis in her shoulder. And then, slowly, the coffee mornings and social events and dinners started to become a little more sporadic and she found herself spending more and more time at home, in her own company. As her life became less hectic, she began retreating into her own thoughts, going back to her career, to things that she wished she’d done, or done better. Finally, she found herself digging out her old notebook, flicking through its yellowed pages, and – in the middle – stopping at the names of the ones that had got away: Gabriel Wilzon and Donald Klein. Once she saw them, everything came full circle.

She remembered the call she’d taken about Adrian Vale.

She remembered the man called Patrick.

In the first conversation he’d had with her, he’d given her his surname. She recalled that clearly, she just didn’t recall what it was. She’d never written it down. Her hangover had been so bad that day, her stomach churning, her head thumping, that the notes she’d made had ended up being worthless. She’d been banking on the follow-up call to fill in the blanks.

But the follow-up had been totally different.

Because whoever had called her the second time hadn’t been Patrick.

Even then, she sat on that knowledge – the certainty that a deception had taken place – for a long time doing nothing about it, anxious about letting her old life invade the sanctity of her retirement. But with every passing week, the more she denied herself, the more it ate away at her and, eventually, she found it impossible to resist any longer. At the point she finally started looking properly into who the call had been from, and who the real Patrick was, over sixteen months had passed. But, immediately, she started to hit barriers. The name was too common, the search parameters too wide. Was she looking for a Patrick who knew Adrian Vale? Was she looking for a Patrick who knew Beatrix Steards? Or was she looking for neither? All three routes ended up in dead ends so she then decided to switch tack.

She went back to landline phone records she’d already pulled from AT&T and zeroed in on the second call on 1 November 2015 from the man claiming to be Patrick.

The number was listed as UNKNOWN.

But the first call wasn’t.