There was something guarded about the way she said it, but Steph was too dazed to process what it might be. Robin Lyle, she recalled hazily. Was he Zeb’s dad? The man in the hard hat, another stranger Steph had painted her own guilt onto. She stumbled toward the door, reaching for its handle, as though for an escape lever. When she got there, she paused and turned back. “Thank you for telling me,” she said.

Emma’s blue hair glowed like a gas flame beneath the lights. “I just hope she comes home, Steph.”

Steph felt tears building deep inside: the kind that might tear her in half if she let them out. “Could I . . . could I ask you not to say anything about this to anyone? I’ll take it from here.”

Emma nodded, and to Steph’s relief, she didn’t press for any more information. They looked at each other for a few more seconds, a silent contract forming between them.

Steph fled into the hallway and stood wheezing for breath, the potential scale of her misjudgments starting to take hold. She forced herself upright, walked out of the house, and got into her car. As she accelerated away, she ran through recent conversations with Freya, occasions on which she might have spotted her mum “somewhere she shouldn’t be,” or seen her shielding her phone, hiding a bank statement. Suddenly Freya’s silences at breakfast weren’t just late-onset teenage mood swings. The disappearance of kisses from the end of her texts was not simply a side effect of her growing up, or the petering out of their duvet nights in front of The Apprentice, their chats about books, their chats full stop.

And Paul was not the only parent with secrets that mattered.

How could she have been so blinkered as to think he was?

Steph was under no illusions about what it might have done to Freya, if she’d feared a threat to her parents’ marriage. She thought again of little Freya wearing her wedding veil around their first flat, accessorizing it with a pair of Paul’s shin pads, tripping over the trailing lace every few steps. And how she’d been so upset, so scared when Jess’s parents had split up—the first time it had happened to someone she was close to.

She still had one of our wedding photos in her room. Had Freya taken it from the album recently, while she’d been stewing over her suspicions? Or had she had it for a while, just because she liked it?

The deception would have wounded her too. The thought that her mum had been lying to her, to Paul, and at the same time cheerfully buying Freya daffodils, trying to continue with their mother-daughter TV nights, their banter about applying to the same universities . . .