Passing her a large, fluffy white bath towel, Alfie wrapped it around her as she turned off the water, stepping out onto the black marble floor. ‘You look tired, Fran. You need to sleep. It won’t help anything if you make yourself ill. Driving around Richmond isn’t going to do you any favours either.’

Franny was puzzled. ‘Richmond?’

It was Alfie’s turn to look puzzled. ‘Yeah, you said you drove there.’

‘Oh God, yeah, sorry, I’m not thinking straight. I can’t even remember what I was doing five minutes ago. I’m all over the place.’

‘And you still haven’t heard about Mia?’

Tightly Franny shook her head.

‘What’s that?’ Alfie pointed to the black bin liner in the corner.

Sounding as casual as she could, Franny wrapped her long hair up in a bun before pulling on a clean, grey cashmere tracksuit. ‘Just some clothes I’m throwing out. I was trying to keep myself busy by doing a bit of a tidy-up.’

As Alfie looked at Franny, he couldn’t quite help but think she seemed different. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was something strange, something distant about her, though perhaps that was only to be expected after what happened with her friend’s baby.

From thinking about Mia, Alfie’s thoughts then shifted to Shannon, to Charlie, to what he had said about Bree’s baby. He wasn’t going to tell Franny what had happened to Charlie, after all he had promised her he’d leave well enough alone and the last thing he wanted was to add on any more stress. It certainly didn’t look like she could handle it.

But not saying anything about Charlie didn’t mean that it wasn’t bugging him, eating away at the back of his head. How did Shannon know about Bree? And why would Charlie say to ask Franny about Bree’s baby when there was no baby? Maybe he’d been talking about her daughter, Molly. But why would he call Molly, who was almost seven, a baby?

Though he supposed Charlie had always been a headfuck. He’d always got off on playing games with people’s minds, and maybe saying what he had done was just part of his amusement, knowing that it would wind him up … upset him, and it wasn’t hard to work out how he’d found out about it.