I remembered something Natalia said when she first saw my folio, about how the girls on crime novel covers always look like they are in-between places. That’s exactly where we’ve all been for the last few months. In-between hope and despair.

I try to explain my new angle, but Natalia gets impatient. ‘You’re making no sense. Send a pic.’

I do that, and then she’s quiet for way too long.

‘Are you mad that I cut it up?’

‘No,’ Natalia replies immediately. ‘It’s good. I don’t have any words at the moment, Chloe, but it’s good.’

‘It’s about the in-between places,’ I tell her, ‘and the girls in them. I remembered what you’d said. The real world, and other places too.’

The white canvas with the floating girl used to mean a place we couldn’t imagine. Doctor Calm’s house as it appeared in the police sketches, or another dimension we couldn’t fathom. And now we know the white expanse means the end; peace, we hope, or rest.

‘Cut out of life,’ says Natalia flatly, and then she’s quiet. I stay on the line and we breathe in unison for a while, letting stillness hold us together.

‘Please come tomorrow, I need your face in the crowd,’ she says after a while, and then she hangs up.

NATALIA

DAY 69

I’ve already been awake a few hours or maybe I never even went to sleep at all when Liv knocks on the wall adjoining my room and the spare bedroom that she’s been methodically transforming into a messy hovel.

She knocks and knocks and you bet she won’t stop knocking until I knock back: I’m alive, I’m okay, I’m here. We knock good night and we knock good morning and you can say a lot with a knock apparently. I’m already dreading when she goes back to her own apartment and things supposedly return to normal.

My eyes close again but then my bedroom door clicks and Liv is there with her woolly blanket clutched around her like a couture cape.

‘You still want to do it?’ she says. ‘Let’s do it early before Mum can stop us.’

We creep downstairs, avoiding the two creaky steps and it would be like midnight feasts or Christmas morning except that today is Yin’s memorial service and the whole of Balmoral will be there and I have to speak.

There’s no point to our stealth because when we get downstairs Mum is already in the kitchen drinking carrot juice in her pilates gear and Dad is pan-frying mattress-sized slabs of French toast which is basically their entire relationship summed up in one neat scene.