She tried not to think about it now. She wanted to go home. She was ready to be alone again, to be somewhere she could close the door. Still she couldn’t accept that Danny would take his own life, and the more she considered it, the less likely it seemed. But it was worse than that: the police had said he had taken the life of someone else. That wasn’t possible. That wasn’t Danny.

She checked her phone for the umpteenth time that day and got the same result. She hadn’t missed a call from the police; they hadn’t tried calling her to tell her it was all a big mistake. Danny hadn’t called either, apologising that he had lost his phone while out on a bender. The silence was deafening. She only hoped that the group she was leaving behind would be as silent. She had begged them not to share, at least until she had spoken to her son.

When she pulled up outside her home four minutes later, her phone was ringing. She dropped it in the footwell in her haste to answer.

‘Dammit!’ The seatbelt caught her as she tried to jerk forward. She had to slow her movements down. The caller showed as withheld.

‘Hello?’

‘Sharon Evans?’ A man’s voice, deep and assured.

‘Who is this?’

‘One down, Sharon. You will lose everything you hold dear. No more lies. I told you that bef—’ Sharon cut the call. Her hand shook as she held down the button to turn it off and instantly regretted it. Maybe she should use it to call the police? To tell them that the calls were happening again.

But she didn’t. She left the phone off and pushed it into her pocket instead. What was the point? The last time they had said there was nothing they could do, that the calls were ‘untraceable’. It had sounded like a fob-off at the time. The calls had started when the papers had run the story about Callie, her admission to hospital and how it was linked to a police investigation. They couldn’t name her, supposedly for her own protection, but they could make it damned obvious who they were writing about. The stories in the press had been hard. They were unavoidable, as were the trolls that liked to add their poisonous comments. Social media seemed to have a knack of bringing out the worst in people. Sharon knew why: it was because they could hide behind their screens, behind their fake names and fake profile pictures. These people were cowards looking for a reaction. She convinced herself that the calls were the same.

Sharon threw her phone straight onto the kitchen counter when she got inside but she didn’t take her eyes off it. This felt different. The timing, for one. She ran the phone call back through her mind. It made her shiver: One down, Sharon!