I’m bent almost double with the shock of it: a coincidence so crazy and improbable and bizarre. I pull out my phone again and open up my email. My personal email account this time. I have to scroll back and back and back, it has to be three years back at least.

But here it is.

The message reads: Hi Jenn, here’s the letter template you needed. Hope that it’s come through okay. Stay in touch!

The email is signed: Sarah

And the address is: [email protected].

Chapter 11

I knew her. I knew her.

Ms Sarah Jones was that Sarah. The blonde-haired girl with a gap in her teeth.

I see her, a flash in my memory, three desks along from me, next to the window. Prettier, friendlier, more confident than me. That conversation just before I left, when we exchanged personal emails, because a document needed transferring and all our work accounts were playing up.

The civil service administration office. How long did I work there? Five months, six? Our lives crossed over for a few weeks, little more. The hours were so awkward with Charlie’s schooling, and the Housing Association contract fitted so much better. We’d been colleagues, nothing else: until now I hadn’t even remembered her second name – Jones, such a common surname, it could have belonged to anyone. People were always coming and going from there; half the office was staffed with anonymous temps, a set-up that suited me just fine.

And I never stayed in touch, because I never did with anyone – school friends, uni friends, colleagues from past jobs. They drifted away and I always let them drift – and so I never spoke to her again. But I knew her, and she knew me.

Sarah from the civil service office. I try to call up other details about her, but all I can see is her sitting with her legs crossed at her computer: the red shoes and blue tights she wore. The picture of her parents she kept on her desk.

Now Ms Jones and my Sarah are one and the same.

And I don’t know a single detail of what happened in between.

However guilty, however responsible I felt before, now it is so much worse. I knew her, I worked with her, but at the end of her life, she had no one. So many people must have turned away, let her down. And now there’s me who never stayed in touch.

I have to do something. I call Emma’s mobile and when she picks up, I lie to her. ‘I’m not well,’ I say. ‘A stomach bug, I think. I need to get home. I’ll leave a message for Abayomi, but can you let him know as well?’

Emma agrees, the way she always does, keen to please.