There was always an uncertainty in him, she thought. He had never been one hundred per cent certain about anything. Well, except their family. But even there, it seemed, he’d had his doubts. She used to find it irritating, the way he would say one thing and then qualify it with the possibility of the opposite also being true. And all those nervous habits, really, for such an intelligent man, what did he have to be so nervous about? But then, she would overhear someone who wasn’t nervous, someone who talked without acknowledging the possibility that they could be wrong, and she would feel this sort of … what was it, that she was proud of him? That she recognised it was better to doubt yourself than to never doubt at all?

The police officers had stopped talking now and it was strange that although they were in her house, and sitting on her sofa in her living room, she felt like she had to be the one to stand up and leave. She still hadn’t spoken, and she didn’t want to speak. But there had to be something in life that was certain, and for her it had been James and so she stood up and turned away from the police officers and took a single step away from the table they were seated around, and that was when it hit her. As her right foot landed on the carpeted floor and she felt a splintering inside her chest, even though she kept walking away, her head high and she didn’t stop and didn’t break down, that was the moment when Julianne Quentin realised that she had loved her husband.

A woman with long, curly grey hair and large tortoiseshell-framed glasses opened the door. She looked at Holly. Holly looked back.

‘This is Bea,’ said Declan, touching her hand. Eva and Piotr walked down the hallway first, and as Holly followed them Bea was by her side.

‘You’re Holly Bhattacharyya,’ she said.

Declan paused, turned to look at Holly, the recognition warming his expression.

‘She used to tell us stories about you,’ Bea smiled.

Holly knew, from the way Bea spoke, that Freida was dead. She was gone. And it seemed that before she died she had found a place where she could belong, after all.

In the warm living room, with the wood-burning stove crackling in the corner, Holly sat quietly, her knee aching again, as Declan stumbled his way through the bad news. He was doing his best, and he must have been caught off guard by their arrival, after all this time. Seven years ago, did he say? Had she really died seven years ago?

And no one even knew, Holly thought.