‘You have to promise it won’t go any further. Not even Sean. Especially not your children.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’m only going to tell you this because you’re my dear friend, and I want you to understand.’

I thought about Alistair by the pool, looking at Lucy’s social media accounts. I wondered if she was about to tell me something about him – that she knew he was doing it and would speak to him. Perhaps he’d been doing it for years.

But it wasn’t her husband she wanted to tell me about.

‘Do you remember last year, when Jake had encephalitis?’

I nodded. ‘He’s fine now, though, isn’t he?’

She smiled a sad little smile and looked at the ground. ‘Most of the time, yes.’

‘And he’s got so tall this past year, I can’t believe he’s already overtaken—’

‘It wasn’t encephalitis.’

I waited for a moment, thinking I’d not heard her right. ‘He was misdiagnosed, you mean?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t understand, Jennifer.’

‘That was just what we told people. We didn’t want him to be stigmatised.’

She looked away, across the garden, tears in her eyes. I waited for her to continue, but she seemed to have lost her words.

I put a hand on her arm. ‘It’s OK.’

She looked back at me, then over to the villa, checking again that no one else was within earshot.

‘The real reason was that he had to go away from us for a little while, for some treatment.’ A tear spilled down her cheek. ‘He was going to hurt himself, Kate. You can’t understand if it’s never happened to you, but we had an argument one day, seemed like nothing out of the ordinary, just something silly about tidying his room, which he never seemed to want to do. But he reacted like – like I’d accused him of a terrible crime. He went nuclear. And then I found him sitting on his window ledge, and you know his bedroom is two storeys up, right?’

I nodded. ‘The attic room.’