‘Katherine Hallows,’ he said faintly, as if the memories were filling with colour inside his head. ‘She just vanished at the end of that summer. I never heard from her again.’ He stared at her, drinking her in. ‘And you . . .’

‘And I was the reason for that disappearance, yes,’ Frankie replied. Stating the bleeding obvious, as Craig would say. ‘Look,’ she went on apologetically, ‘I realize this is not exactly the best day for us to be meeting, so—’

‘Everything all right, Harry?’ There was a woman by his side suddenly, with bobbed silvery hair and a mint-green dress, placing a proprietorial hand on his jacket sleeve. Her quick, flashing glance tick-tocked between Frankie and Harry, and the air seemed to crackle with suspicion.

‘So it can absolutely wait for another time,’ Frankie said quickly, guessing that this was his wife – the Jeanie of the fluttering foiled banner – who presumably knew nothing about what her husband had been up to thirty-five years ago. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

Harry hesitated. ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said quietly, his eyes kind and friendly. ‘Will you tell me your name?’

‘Harry, they want us to cut the cake after this song,’ his wife interrupted, tugging at his arm. Her face had gone very tight and pink, and she was no longer looking at Frankie. Had she guessed? Frankie wondered with a gulp.

Guilt twisted her insides. Starting a family ruck had really not been her game-plan. ‘It’s Frankie,’ she replied as the woman began hustling Harry away.

He looked back over his shoulder at her. ‘Frankie,’ he repeated earnestly and they stared at one another for a final moment. ‘Well, then. Another time. I promise.’ Then his wife steered him firmly across the room, and that had been that.

With a wave of hot shame at her own impetuous blundering, Frankie had slunk out of the hall and scuttled, head-down, back along the road to her car. Her hands shook as she clicked in her seatbelt, and she felt very much like leaning her head on the steering wheel and crying. It was only the vision of the nosy neighbour rapping on the window – ‘Everything all right, love?’ – and asking prying questions that compelled her to turn the key in the ignition and drive away.

Once in the anodyne safety of her hotel bedroom, she had sunk onto the bed in a daze, her head seething and whirling with what had just happened. She had met him. She had spoken to him. He was real. He had looked at her and seen her mother’s eyes in hers and they had recognized something in one another, blood signalling to blood. Kathy, she kept hearing him say, with that catch in his voice.