‘End it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cathy prevaricates. ‘Like –’

‘Like?’

‘I could say it was me. For you. And it’d end it. I’d be out in ten years, maybe, and no more lies.’

Frannie is looking at her in shock, and Cathy adds a smile, a split-second after the sentence is uttered, and she thinks she just about saved it, just about caught it, just about pretended she didn’t mean it.

‘It’s so quiet here,’ Tom says. He texted her. Fancy a walk someday soon? Can do mornings, evenings, weekends, whatever to suit you. And she couldn’t resist replying, despite everything.

And now he is standing outside Cathy’s front door wearing his parka. Cathy likes that he is wearing the same coat today as the other day. Something about it comforts her, as though he is living his life completely honestly, no continuity errors.

It’s cloudy today, the relentless rain paused. It feels almost autumnal out here, Cathy thinks, as she locks her front door behind her. The bite of wood smoke on the breeze, the slight chill across her shoulders.

It’s nice to be doing this and not that. Nice not to be thinking about the search of the woods.

She raced into the shower after work, washing off the antiseptic. She’s blow-dried her hair like Frannie’s, and now here she is, feeling strange dressed up, wearing make-up, in the evening, in the twilight.

Tom is wearing white trainers and dark skinny jeans. He gives his half-smile, his face almost childlike in the surrounds of his fur-lined hood. Maybe he’s nervous.

Next door, she hears Joe’s television through an open window. She can almost always hear what he’s watching with Lydia. Sometimes she can hear Frannie too. She wonders if they notice how late she stays up working. If they judge her for it, working alone in the spare bedroom she converted to an office.

Frannie bought the first cottage when she was pregnant with Paul. Their parents helped her. Later on, her neighbour talked about selling, moving closer to the centre of Birmingham, and Joe made her an offer. And then, when the next house came on the market, Frannie got the Rightmove alert and sent it to Cathy. They couldn’t believe their luck, the fortuitousness of it. They’d congregated at Frannie’s while Paul was in bed. They’d sat around her kitchen table and drunk Indian tea – Frannie was going through a phase of drinking only this, and insisting the same of everybody else, Cathy seems to remember – and laughed at how wild it was that they were all going to try to live together, all three of them in a neat little row. ‘Oh, we’ll be able to do our toenails, and you’ll be able to do bed and bath with Paul,’ Frannie had said, her eyes alight with something. She wanted Cathy near her. Not as much as she wanted Joe, but it was enough. She looks back now and wonders how much of Cathy was involved in that decision, and how much was her following her siblings’ lead.