Don’t be ridiculous, it’s the other side of the country.

It doesn’t matter.

You can’t. It’ll take hours.

Anyone would.

‘No,’ she had told him later, as his car purred down the motorway. ‘Anyone wouldn’t.’

And he’d looked surprised.

‘Of course they would.’

‘No,’ she said again. ‘They wouldn’t.’

‘So cynical.’ His hands were steady on the steering wheel. ‘Miranda, isn’t it? I’m Tom.’

She’d known then: looking at the neatly cut hair, the hazel eyes, the carefully cleaned car. No one cleaned their car back then. No one. Cars a chaos of McDonald’s wrappers and Lucozade bottles and fumes of a hangover.

Known that this might be foundations for happiness, at last. Maybe.

He’d stayed. Her mother crying on his shoulder, the stink of gin in the air. After a day, it was as if he had been there for ever.

But now the foundations were slipping away. It was never No; just I’m not ready yet.

Unforgivable, really.

If a man had done this . . . She knew.

But I meant not yet. And it was only as I got closer . . .

He’d waited, a kind man.

But now . . .

And one Sunday morning, it was No.

20

20

Casey sat on a train, gazing out of the window. She stared into the sitting rooms of a thousand houses, all the way down the railway track. These gardens were neat in the morning sun: a trampoline here, a cherry tree there. Casey shuddered as a single magpie hopped away from the onrush of the train.

The train pulled into the station and Casey couldn’t breathe. Surrey, and he was everywhere.

A brilliant mind, people had always said, smiling. And such charisma. They would remember meeting him, just once, twenty years ago.

She remembered sitting on a knee, in front of a fireplace. Suit trousers and crisp white shirts. Clever grey eyes, dark hair and electric bursts of attention. Jigsaw puzzles, and a fizz of excitement when he arrived. The flat shrank around him. Her mother laughing, which she never did normally.

Coming and going. Mainly going.

He’s away for work, her mother would say, almost bravely.

When she was older, he liked her mind. Quizzical, he said. Sharp. There was pride there, for a while.

Too sharp, like him. He taught her chess. There were games, too. Treasure hunt, hide and seek. Murder in the dark.

And then, one day, he left his book behind. The bookmark, a photograph.

Three blonde children, sitting on a big navy sofa. On holiday, she guessed, by the shorts and swimsuits and tans. One boy waving a small tennis racket.

Three golden faces, laughing with the confidence of love. Picture perfect, and safe. And she’d known, at once, that she was the other. That she was the secret. That she was the one who wasn’t real.