‘We’ll sort all that out later.’ She thinks of the ring wrapped in a tissue down the side of her suitcase which is probably still somewhere at Dean’s. Or perhaps the cops have it.

Dean looks bewildered. She kisses his hand, places it on the bed. Looks back at him as she leaves. He’s staring straight ahead, eyes wide, mouth slightly open.

As Oli walks to the lift, she doesn’t feel sad, just numb. Like her insides have been scooped out.

Lily jumps up the second she sees her. ‘How’d you go? Quick, let’s go before we tick into another hour. It’s already going to cost me sixteen bucks.’

They walk side by side.

Lily jabs at the button to the downstairs car park. She looks sideways at Oli before saying quietly, ‘I just saw a news report confirming the girl is Louise Carter. They’ve done tests.’

Oli nods. Doesn’t trust herself to speak.

Cooper’s funeral is tomorrow. She needs to get through that, then decide what happens next.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: FIVE WEEKS LATER

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

FIVE WEEKS LATER

OLI FINISHES HER COFFEE, SIGHS AND RE-READS THE PARAGRAPH she just typed. She hasn’t been crippled by this type of palpable anxiety about her writing for years. In some ways it feels good to care so much, for the stakes to be so high. On the other hand, it feels like jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

She and TJ have gone around the grounds on everything from the name of their new business to whether they should bother to set up a landline number. And now it’s less than twenty-four hours until the launch.

‘We’re a modern newsroom, and for a while at least there’s only the three of us,’ TJ said last week, his eyes virtually falling out of his head after another lengthy planning session. ‘I think we just list our mobile numbers and be done with it.’

‘I agree,’ Chelsea mumbled from her spot on the couch at TJ’s place, where she was coding their website.

‘We will grow, though,’ Oli countered.

‘So we’ll sort out a different phone number, then.’ TJ yawned.

‘We need to settle on some target numbers,’ she reminded him. ‘What do you think, two thousand subscribers in the first two weeks? We’ve already hit over three hundred.’

‘No way—two thousand subscribers on day one,’ he replied, grinning.

‘Serial had over a million downloads in the first week,’ Chelsea said. She shrugged her tattooed shoulders. ‘Just saying.’