I look to her clothes hanging in the wardrobe, and almost expect them to come to life, to morph into living objects, like the Disney film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and go about pulling me up, brushing me down and telling me how to get through this.

I imagine her red-starred sneakers, the ones I’d coveted so much when I was a young girl, flying off the bottom shelf to show me the way forward. I rise from the bed. Where are her red-starred sneakers?

An overwhelming panic fills my chest as I scurry around in the bottom of the wardrobe, sure that they’re here somewhere. They’ve got to be.

They were the last thing she wore. She’d breathed her last breath in them, and not being able to see them sends me into a whole new world of pain.

I run into our bedroom and rummage through the cupboards, already knowing they’re not in there. Why would I move them? Why would I need to?

It’s then that it hits me. The police must have taken them when they searched the house. I hadn’t seen everything they’d seized and to look at the house now, you’d be hard pushed to know they’d even been here, but I guess the missing parts of me are only going to be realized over the coming days. But why would they take my mom’s shoes? Unless they thought they were mine.

I try to shake off the unsettling feeling that they’re currently being analysed in a lab somewhere and instead focus on it being a sign from Mom. This is her way of telling me that they’re going to do everything they can to pin this on me, but that she’s going to do everything in her power to get me out of it.

Pick yourself up and dust yourself down, I can hear her say. The only way you’re going to get yourself out of this is to keep pushing to find out who’s doing this to you.

I can’t help but acknowledge that every finger points to Leon. From him being at the hotel to the phone being found in the bathroom, there’s not a more likely suspect, but why would he do this to me? Even if he’d done something terrible to Jacob in a jealous rage because he genuinely thought we were having an affair, would he really go to such lengths to make it look like it was me?

If he’s killed someone, he’s capable of anything, I say to myself, answering my own question.

I need him to tell me that I’ve got this all wrong; that he wouldn’t dream of doing what I’m accusing him of.

‘I can’t talk right now,’ he says curtly when he picks up the phone, doing nothing to allay my fears.