They meet at least once a week: sometimes Saffy drives over to Portishead or Lorna will come to the cottage. They are close in a way that Lorna never was with Daphne. There was always a gulf between them that she could never explain. But now she knows why. On some unconscious level she must have known that Daphne was an imposter.

She has been seeing Felicity once a fortnight, and she’s been great at helping Lorna work through her issues, mainly her worry about being the child of two murderers, not that she puts Rose and Victor in the same bracket. And Felicity has made her see she doesn’t have a dark heart, that it’s not genetic. But she has made Lorna understand that she does run away from her problems and she does have trouble forging romantic relationships. So that’s something she’s going to work on in the future. There is still a spark between her and Euan – he’s even been to stay with her in her new place. She doesn’t know where it will lead – if anywhere – but she’s excited to find out.

‘So,’ says Theo, lifting his glass. Tom is standing at the barbecue in the corner, a pair of tongs in his hand, which he raises instead of a glass. ‘To justice.’

‘To justice,’ they all echo.

‘And to the future,’ says Lorna, and Jen strokes her bump, reaching for Theo’s hand.

Yesterday they found out that Victor’s trial, which had gone on for weeks, had finally come to an end. Victor refused to plead guilty to murder; his plea of manslaughter was turned down. So a trial went ahead and he was found guilty of the murder of Caroline Carmichael, as well as sexual offences against the women in his folder. Twenty different women. He’ll be sentenced next month. Lorna knows Theo has never gone to visit him and she won’t either. She has no interest in getting to know her so-called father.

There was never enough evidence to charge Victor with Rose’s murder. Lorna’s heart feels heavy when she thinks of Daphne, lying in her care-home bed, admitting to what she had done. It was the first time she really felt the woman she had always thought of as her mother was telling the truth. Neither she nor Saffy told the police about Daphne’s confession. Maybe they would have if Victor had ever been charged.

She died a few days later. Pneumonia. Saffy took her death a lot harder than Lorna did. Saffy had found it in her giant heart to forgive Daphne but Lorna is unsure if she ever can. Daphne robbed Lorna of her real mother, a mother she can barely remember, and that breaks her heart.