‘You see that rose bed?’ She nodded to a circular flower bed in the garden next door. ‘That’s where it happened. That is where my child drowned. They filled it in, the pond, but I still see it every day, the place where my baby died.’

Tears welled in Pip’s eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She put a hand to her face to wipe them away. This was not her grief – she had no right to cry, just like she had no right to cry for the lost life of the boy. Yet the tears still came.

‘The damage done by sudden death is devastating and irreversible,’ Evelyn continued, her voice low and very calm as if she were preaching or delivering a sentence. ‘Attaching blame can only take you so far. Believe me, I know. Just because everyone says it wasn’t your fault doesn’t mean that you can move on. But you do owe it to yourself to try. You’re young, Pip, with your whole life ahead of you. You mustn’t let that one terrible moment blight your entire future. Yes, you’ll feel guilt. That’s only to be expected. It’s misplaced, but it’s unavoidable. But you can’t let it define who you are for the rest of your life. I let that happen to me. At the time, I couldn’t find any other way through the pain, but now I see that it might have been a mistake. I urge you to look at things differently and not to do what I did.’

Evelyn’s words confused Pip. Was she saying that she had felt some guilt for her part in Scarlet’s death, despite how it had come across in the diary? If so, then maybe the two of them had more in common than she’d thought. Their bond was not merely because neither of them had fitted into the place they had been allocated in life. There was this other, much bigger and more painful connection binding them.

But then again, Evelyn’s child had drowned under her care. Pip had knocked the boy down, but she had no responsibility for his being there in the middle of the road. Did that somehow make her guilt different to Evelyn’s? Was there a way to rank levels of guilt? Pip didn’t know what to think, but something about Evelyn’s calm yet intense grief superseded all that. It was this powerful sense of loss the two of them shared. Loss and pain. And at this moment, it made the connection Pip felt towards Evelyn stronger than anything she had felt with any other person since the accident. Even though she was as good as a stranger, Pip wanted to reach out and hold her, comfort her, and in doing so, be comforted herself. But she held herself back.