He spooned the food into her mouth and she ate it quickly. When the jar was empty she settled down, and he picked up his phone. There was a text from Roland.

Did you get my email earlier?

Checking now. Didn’t have a signal by the lake.

He opened the email.

Tom. Check out this photo. You need to see this.

Attached, there was a message from Nellie and a photo.

Hi Roland

I found one more photo you might use. It’s from the summer after we graduated. Mads and I went travelling. Alice was going to come, but in the end she went away with her boyfriend at the time (a guy called Ned). They broke up and she went travelling by herself around Europe but she did send a photo of her and an Australian she met – called Brenda, I think – from when she was in the Lake District. In fact, now I think about it, it was more or less the last time I heard from her. She went to live in Warrington after that summer and we all drifted apart. Fortunately now we’re back in touch!

Nellie

He opened the photo. Alice was sitting next to a blonde woman – Brenda, presumably – beside a river. Again, he was struck by how different she looked to the woman he had married.

Weirdly, Brenda resembled Alice now, at least facially. She had the same sharp features and muscular frame. At a glance, they could have been sisters.

He took a closer look. His back tightened and he felt a dryness in his mouth.

They could have been more than sisters.

They could have been twins.

But that was impossible. He read the message from Nellie again. Brenda – the blonde woman in the photo – was some Australian that Alice had met when she was in the Lake District after she graduated.

But she did look a lot like Alice.

Identical, in fact.

He heard footsteps on the terrace and lifted his head from the screen. Alice was standing there, holding the oars.

He glanced at the photo, then at her, then back at the photo.

It was impossible to miss.

Alice was in the photograph, but she was not the woman on the left, the woman with short, dark hair who was in all the other photos of Alice that Nellie had sent.

She was the woman on the right.

The long, blonde-haired Australian called Brenda.

Alice

Tom was looking at her in an odd way. His mouth was slack, as though he was in deep thought. He kept looking at her and then at his phone.

‘Alice,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Can I show you something?’

‘Of course.’

He seemed shocked. Scared, almost. She tensed. What the hell did he have on his phone?

Possibilities flashed through her mind. The message she had sent to Eric asking about the boat, maybe. Or her text messages to Nadia and Kay about his moods.