As cars flashed past her on the motorway, Steph realized she was slowing. Because she was no longer sure this was the right thing to do, the right place to go. She kept imagining Freya behind her, in a Mini Cooper like the ones they used to jokily draw for one another.

Following her.

How far, exactly, might she have got?

At the next junction, Steph turned off. She circled an island and rejoined the M3 to speed back home. All the way, she irrationally scanned the landscape for some kind of sign from her daughter. If she’d been blind before, now Steph had to open her eyes.

32.

PAUL

Paul searched Sanderson’s house, on high alert for sounds of him arriving home. He imagined spotting Freya’s school blazer hanging in a cupboard, a long blonde hair shimmering on the carpet. Breathing hard, he hurried up the stairs. The rooms were soulless, nothing particularly personal or sentimental anywhere. Yet little touches of luxury suggested Sanderson had some money. A flatscreen TV in the bedroom; a super-king-sized bed, which looked slept-in on one side only. Perhaps he still had part of the appallingly huge payoff they’d been forced to award him. But nobody, it seemed, to share it with.

The attic staircase was steep and narrow, like climbing up a dim, dusty tunnel. Different from the gentle curve of the wooden steps up to Freya’s attic room. When Paul reached the top of Sanderson’s, he hesitated before groping for a light switch.

Then he staggered backward.

She was in here. She was everywhere. Photos of Nathalie papered the walls: smiling, biting her lip, hiding from the camera, walking away and toward. The expressions on her face were achingly familiar, yet at one remove in their age-faded colors, like seeing somebody who vividly resembled her. Her wide green eyes, the fall of her hair, the pucker of the skin above her nose.

Paul flinched away as sadness barreled into him. But other images took shape, took on a life of their own, filling in the parts the photos couldn’t show. Nathalie smoking alone outside the tower block; Paul approaching her for the first time, walking another man’s walk, offering a light. The hurt she always seemed to carry in her posture, the dreams that would trouble her eyelids as she slept. Yet her openness, too: always so openhearted and hopeful, despite everything.

Paul’s eyes went to a photo of her and Sanderson. Sanderson seemed to glare out of the picture, wary and possessive, his arm clamped tight around Nathalie.

And suddenly Paul couldn’t actually think of him as Sanderson anymore, the way Glover and other colleagues had referred to him as they’d hovered at the edges of the operation. He couldn’t stay detached enough from the feelings of hatred and guilt and confusing nostalgia that were stirred up when he looked into Daniel’s eyes.