I thought as soon as I returned that people would be pointing at me and whispering, but that isn’t happening. It feels like most of the people walking around are just visiting for the day. If I didn’t know what I know, I would think it was a beautiful place, the kind of place I would aspire to live in one day.

I go to a small tea room and order a sandwich. It feels like a living room, the walls covered in a flocked wallpaper smattered with little photo frames and inspirational quotes on small tapestries. It’s not the sort of place I would have ventured into when I was a teenager.

‘Has this place been here long?’ I ask the proprietor when she puts my food in front of me.

‘We took it over about twelve years ago, but the previous owners were here for a long time before that. Before that I think it used to be a hairdresser’s. Where are you from then?’ She answers me with far more information than I expected and a question thrown in just to spike my anxiety.

‘Just visiting from The Lake District.’

‘Oh, I’d love to go there, it’s beautiful. You visiting family here?’

‘No, my family is all back in the Lakes, I just fancied a getaway,’ I lie, trying to appear like a person who would just take a holiday on their own for the experience, not like someone who gets an anxiety attack even having to leave the house to post a letter.

‘Oh, well, it’s lovely here, too. You staying local?’

‘Yes, at the Victoria.’ I feel a little embarrassed as I say it, as if I am showing off. I notice a slight change in her expression; I have a feeling she thinks less of me now. Maybe that’s what I wanted.

‘You here on your own then?’

‘My husband is joining me with the kids at the weekend,’ I say, kicking myself for giving anything about myself away. I change the subject quickly. ‘I heard about that girl that went missing.’

‘Oh gosh yes, that was awful. They haven’t found her yet. It’s been a few days so I doubt they will either.’

‘Did you know her?’

She shakes her head.

‘She wasn’t local then?’

‘She lived up Manston way and the family were a little weird. Just her and her mum, I think. They only moved back to the town a year or so ago, but I think the mum was originally from round this way.’

A year would be considered very new to the area. If people could say what age you were when you moved here, they’d hold it against you. I remembered a Polish boy who joined at the beginning of secondary and no one let him forget it. He was the ‘new kid’ until someone newer came along, which wasn’t until four years later.