She steps next into the body scanner. It beeps. Her heart speeds up. A man waves a scanning wand over her. She finds she is holding her breath. It moves between her arms and the sides of her body. It moves between her legs. It comes back up, down the length of her arm and, just as it does, she meets his eye, just briefly. A dark-brown eye, long lashes, a moment of contact. And, as she meets it, she thinks, I buried a body just a handful of days ago. There’s a manhunt for him, and I need to escape.

The airport worker can’t read her mind, of course, and Cathy passes through without incident. But the thoughts still burn on to the inside of her brain. As though they are all there, queued up in her head, waiting to tell somebody. Waiting to be spoken.

In Birmingham, Frannie, Joe and Lydia have gone to the car while Cathy waits in the airport. She is working on her phone, chasing up scans and prescriptions. Her bag is missing. Only hers and a stranger’s, a tall, lithe man who stands next to her. He has a shaved head and is tanned, one hand resting on a hip. He’s wearing a white t-shirt that has three distinct purple blobs down the front of it that for a second Cathy thinks are blood.

He catches her looking. ‘Aeroplane wine,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I hate flying.’

Cathy nods. There is something about his body language that makes her want to keep looking. His weight on one hip. The way his waist is slim compared to the width of his shoulders. The blond hairs on his forearms.

She forces herself to turn away. She’s tired, her feet cold in flip-flops. Gone is the refrigerated air-con of Italy but so too is the heat. It feels blustery even here, inside at the baggage claim, as though a door is open somewhere.

‘Yours lost too?’ the man says. He doesn’t appear to be particularly annoyed. He sits down, right there on the baggage carousel. Cathy stares at his slim ankles and feet bare in his trainers and feels a swoop deep in her gut.

‘Apparently so,’ she says tightly, wondering why she finds this hard, an attractive man sitting near to her, solo, evidently waiting too and wanting to talk to pass the time. Cathy’s shyness is doubled in weight by the shame of it. Why can’t she learn from her date with Pete the rabbit owner? Why can’t she just be like everybody else?

‘Probably being lobbed around somewhere.’ He leans back on his hands and looks at her. His face is open, a wide, white smile aimed at her. Right where his t-shirt meets his shorts is a thin slice of tanned skin, only a millimetre wide. Cathy can’t stop staring at it. The hint of a curl of dark body hair. Her cheeks flush against her will, against the knowledge that she shouldn’t be attracted to anyone right now, not in the current circumstances.