Lizzie swam lengths for as long as she had the energy, counting her strokes, feeling the resistance as she carved through the water, emptying her mind of thought and focussing only on sensation, sound, light and touch. She was exhausted when she climbed out but infuriatingly, as soon as she stepped from the water, the thoughts she had kept at bay for the past hour and a half rushed back clamouring for space and attention. She wondered what Johnny had wanted to talk to her about. She wished he had had the chance to speak to her, wished she had insisted on it. Remembering the solemn child she had met at the wedding and seeing him as this damaged teenager was deeply painful. His situation resonated deeply with her. She wanted to help him and was furious with herself for standing back. Not getting involved, avoiding emotional engagement of any sort had become something of a habit with her. She wondered whether that was why she relied so heavily on the people she had known right from the start, because she was afraid to make new connections...

She sent out for sushi and tempura scallops and settled on the balcony in her bathrobe, her laptop on her knee, watching dusk sink over the river.

Once the food had arrived, she put the boxes on the wooden table next to her, dipping into her favourite Albacore Truffle Ponzu whilst she typed Amelia Lester’s name into the search box. She forced herself to scroll past all the recent lurid stuff about Amelia’s death and the headlines from that morning describing her showdown with Johnny. It seemed like an age ago. Out of sheer curiosity she clicked on the Wikipedia entry that gave Amelia’s family background and found that it was almost as dysfunctional as her own. Half-and step-relations littered the page; it seemed that Arthur Robsart was the eldest, the son of Amelia’s father Terry and a supermodel called Layla El Ansari who originally came from Dubai but now lived in America. Terry Robsart had been a fashion photographer in the eighties and his affair with Layla had been as tempestuous as it was short. He had cheated on her with another model, Jessica Scott, whom he had gone on to marry. This second relationship had produced Amelia, Anna and Johnny before Terry was caught in flagrante again and Jessica walked out on him. After their divorce, Jessica had married an academic called Sam Appleyard, who worked for the British Antarctic Survey.

Lizzie scrolled through various images of the family. Terry Robsart looked startlingly like her own father, not in looks but in the fleshy, bon viveur style of a man who had enjoyed the finer things in life and taken them to excess. He had been a very well-known and successful photographer until he’d drunk himself into an early grave. Jessica, Amelia’s mother, had also died relatively young, from cancer, a few years ago. Lizzie grimaced. Johnny could only have been about fourteen at the time and his siblings not much older. Their mother’s death must have devastated their lives and now they had lost Amelia too. She pushed the hair back from her face with hands that shook a little. What utter crap people had to deal with sometimes.