When it was done, Corinne took a photograph, then held the phone so Beth could see the image on the screen. The tenderness of lines drawn along the curve of the spine – the curlicued leaves, the delicate petals. The ugly gash rendered gentle – artful.

‘You see?’ Corinne said. ‘This is beautiful too.’ Her voice close to Beth’s ear, her breath hot on Beth’s neck.

In the shadowy corners of her mind, Beth heard those words echoing in a different voice, a different room. The silky voice dredged up from her memory, words spoken to make her still and attentive, like a snap in the grass that alerts the deer to danger.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Corinne asked.

‘Nothing,’ Beth replied.

But Beth knew that Corinne had seen it – the shiver that went through her, even though the room was warm.

6

Eva waited until the Campbells had left and little Jo was settled in his room. Then she found her phone and opened up WhatsApp. ‘Coast is clear,’ she typed.

Ten minutes later, she heard the sound of brakes screeching outside and when she went to the door, Callum was locking his bike to the railings.

‘Hey,’ he said, scooting in through the open door quickly before they were seen.

He didn’t kiss her, even though they had kissed a week before outside the tennis club, both of them a little high after their wins.

‘I brought wine,’ he said, following her into the kitchen, where he slid a bottle of red from his backpack and presented it to her. ‘I stole it from my old man’s collection. Hopefully it’s not super-valuable,’ he added, glancing at the label with a nervous laugh. ‘My dad will fucking crucify me if it is.’

Eva knew Callum’s father from all the years he’d been coming to pick up Lisa from her house. Craig and Irene Ferguson were a fixture at the tennis club, both shouty and flamboyant – both voluble when drunk. ‘Dirty money,’ her father had commented after returning from a particularly splashy event at the Fergusons’ Victoria Road house, but it didn’t stop him from drinking their wine or eating their food, she thought glibly. She wondered briefly what her father would think if he knew Callum Ferguson was here, right next door, about to be seduced by his own daughter. Because while neither of them had spoken of it when they’d made the arrangement for this evening, Eva knew that her babysitting gig was an opportunity for them to have sex.