Cara shakes her head. Sam kneels beside her, taking her hand in his. His face is pale, shocked.

‘Cara, I’m so, so sorry,’ he says. ‘I never thought … I didn’t know it would scare you like that. Are you afraid of heights?’

She shakes her head again. ‘It wasn’t that. I wasn’t scared for me.’

There is a moment’s silence and then Sam says: ‘Cara, who is Joe?’

Her eyes fill with tears, she doesn’t want to speak, doesn’t want them to know, but she sees in Sam’s face the guilt, the horror at the pain he has caused her, and she is overwhelmed by the need to exonerate him. Fliss touches Cara’s arm, smoothing her sleeve. This gentleness is Cara’s undoing. She remembers how she and Fliss sat together in the courtyard, sharing; how Fliss opened her heart to her, talking about her brother Jamie, and about Mole, and it gives Cara courage. She knows that she cannot avoid this, that she owes it to Sam, and to Hal and Fliss. She has to tell them.

She begins to talk, randomly at first and then more coherently. She tells how she met Joe in London and fell in love. How, when he went back to Italy, she feared it might be over but then, a few weeks later, he invited her to Rome. He sounded so keen, so passionate, that she believed that he was going to propose to her. Joe met her at Fiumicino Airport and drove her into the city.

She tells the whole story, exactly as she relived it just now up on the roof, leaving out none of the details. How she imagined that she might be going to meet his parents, to stay with them at their town house, but instead he took her to his flat on the top floor of a house in the old part of the city. It was early evening but he didn’t want to go out. Joe wanted to make love. They both did.