Jennifer, on the other hand, may not have the means, but she’s most definitely got the motive. A tear falls onto my cheek as I wonder how far she’d go to avenge her sense of abandonment. Had she recruited Jacob to take me down? Had his whole character and backstory been created specifically for me? Has she played the part of his puppet master, expertly leaving breadcrumbs with my name on, leading the police right to my door?

I unfold the piece of paper I’d written her phone number on and look at it, my fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Are these digits all that I need to unravel what’s going on? Do they hold the key to everything? It’s too much of a coincidence that my sister has just happened to turn up after twenty-six years for them not to.

My hands are shaking as I tap her number on the screen. After all these years spent imagining how it was going to be, this is not the conversation I thought she and I would be having. But I can’t ignore the very real possibility that she’s behind what’s going on.

I imagine her surprise when she hears my voice. She won’t be expecting it for sure; certainly not this soon. Though if she’s innocent in all this, she’ll no doubt be keen to talk to me. But if she’s got something to hide, I might be about to catch her off-guard.

‘Hello,’ she says, her accent instantly taking me back across the Pond. I try to picture her as the thirty-five-year-old woman she now is. But try as I might, all I can see is the nine-year-old child indelibly printed on my mind’s eye.

‘Jen, it’s me,’ I say shakily.

‘Hi,’ she says, hesitantly. ‘Wow, thanks for calling me back.’

There’s a moment of silence as we both feel the weight of what needs to be said hanging between us.

‘What are you doing here, Jen?’ I ask, needing to cut to the chase.

‘I . . . I wanted to see you,’ she says. ‘I got your contact details from Aunt Meryl – well, not directly, but she gave me enough to go on.’

‘So, you know where I live?’

‘Well, I know you’re in . . . Whitstable, is it? Is that how you say it?’ She attempts to laugh.

‘So, you’ve seen him?’ I cut in, still unable to refer to him as my father, our father, all these years later.

‘Yes,’ she says quietly. ‘We met a couple of weeks ago.’

I can hardly bear to ask. ‘And?’

‘And – he’s very sorry,’ she says. ‘For everything. He says not a day has gone by when he hasn’t wondered what had become of us and how his actions had impacted our lives.’

I scoff.