Suddenly she feels weak, exhausted, and embarrassed that they will not know what to say next. She makes a movement, shifting herself to the edge of the sofa as if to get up but Fliss gently presses her back down, not allowing her to leave. Hal stands up, throws some more logs on the fire. Cara sits quite still, Fliss beside her, and Honey comes slowly across to Cara and pushes her head into her lap. Her golden Labrador eyes look up unblinkingly. Cara meets her gaze and reaches out to stroke her soft head with a slight smile. She looks at them again.

‘I’m so sorry. When I was on the roof with Sam …’ She pauses for a moment, shakes her head. ‘I don’t know why; it brought it all back. I was so afraid he was going to fall too, and then it was like I was back there again, in Rome. I’ve never experienced anything like that.’

‘It’s called PTSD,’ says Hal calmly. ‘Your mind stores up the horror, feeds it, plays on it, and then something triggers a relapse and you find yourself reliving the trauma all over again. I’m glad you could tell us. Acknowledging it is almost the first requirement to finding a way through it. I think you’ve been through hell, Cara, but perhaps it’s over now.’

His pragmatic response steadies her far more than any outburst of sympathy could. Somehow it puts her confession into a new perspective: that maybe, somehow, it wasn’t all her fault. That her reactions, her fears were natural, something that might happen to anybody faced with a deeply traumatic event.

‘Thank you for telling us,’ Fliss says. ‘I know that it can’t have been easy after such a long time.’

Sam is watching Cara anxiously and she smiles at him, needing to reassure him.

‘I feel a complete fool,’ she says honestly. ‘But it was time. Thank you.’

Hal steps into the breach. ‘I have an old friend called Claude who says that the sun is always over the yardarm somewhere in the world,’ he says. ‘Let’s have a drink.’

Later, up in her room, Cara sits on the bed and tries to analyse her feelings. She can hardly believe that she has spoken out, told the secrets that she and Philip have kept for so many years.

Why now? she asks herself. Why now, and to three people I hardly know?