As Pip read Evelyn’s words, her cheeks were slick with tears. Since the diary had opened her emotions back up, it seemed as if there would be no closing them again. She wept without pausing, months and months’ worth of stopped-up tears. She wasn’t only crying for Scarlet and Evelyn. She was also, finally, crying for herself.

The parallels between herself and Evelyn were undeniable. Both had had their lives snatched from under them in one cruel, ill-fated second. They had both been merrily going about their business with no inkling of what was about to happen when an outside force had struck them and changed everything irreparably.

Now, though, Pip was starting to see that there were some differences in the two situations. The boy had died under the wheels of her car – that was undeniable – but, despite the guilt that tortured her night and day, she knew that objectively she was not at fault. The witness, the police and the coroner had all agreed. It had been a terrible accident. No one could have prevented what had happened, except the child himself.

But after her trip to the library, Pip now had a slightly different view about Scarlet’s death. The child had been left on her own long enough to find her way out of the house and to the neighbour’s pond. She was only three, and so surely some blame had to attach to that lack of supervision. Yes, it was a terrible accident, but it had been preventable simply by discharging a normal parental duty of care, and Pip found it hard not to place that at Evelyn’s door. She had been the child’s mother and her sole carer. Some of what happened surely had to be her fault.

Yet again Pip thought that that kind of slapdash parenting just didn’t tally with the view of Evelyn she had built up through her reading. There was no way the Evelyn of the diary would leave her child unattended at all, let alone in a place where she might be in such mortal peril; and yet, according to the news report, that was exactly what she had done. If that were true, Pip couldn’t help but judge Evelyn and find her lacking.

The diary, however, seemed to tell another story.

Wednesday 14th September