Chloe closes the book. She doesn’t really need to write everything down in her notes. For now, she sits back on her pillow, holding the material from her blouse between forefinger and thumb, and admiring every individual stitch. Every stitch that Maureen made, for no one else but her.

A few hours later, Chloe is sitting on her bed reading a magazine as she hears Patrick on the landing, then in the bathroom, the sound of the shower turning on and the boiler whirring into action. Afterwards, on his way downstairs, he gives her a knock when he passes by to let her know that dinner is ready. They have these routines now, the kind you find in normal homes. Or at least Chloe likes to think so.

Chloe waits until his footsteps have faded before she gets up from the bed and smooths the creases from her new blouse. She opens the bedroom door and the landing is cloudy with steam and mist from his body spray, a sweet musky scent lingering at the top of the stairwell. She stops there to admire her reflection once more in the glass window. She smooths out the white Peter Pan collar that Maureen so painstakingly sewed. Only that’s when her eyes fall on the photograph on the windowsill and a frozen feeling crawls the length of her spine. It is the same picture she has passed by a thousand times, and yet how could she not have noticed this one thing? She picks it up. In it, Angie is standing in her back garden, long grass licking the back of her knees; she’s laughing into the camera, her hair pulled into two bunches, and she’s holding the same baby doll – Chloe now recognizes – from the spare room that very afternoon. But it’s what Angie’s wearing that takes the breath from her. Chloe looks down at the material on her own blouse – at every mustard sunflower – and then back at the picture. Exactly the same. She feels for her collar, to the starch white shape of it. She is wearing an exact replica. Even the buttons are identical.

She drops the photograph and it clatters against the windowsill.

‘Chloe, love?’ Maureen calls. ‘Everything all right? Dinner’s on the table.’

With shaking hands, Chloe stands the photograph upright again. She hears Maureen’s footsteps heading down the hall.

‘Chloe? Is everything OK?’

‘Fine,’ Chloe calls back, ‘just coming.’

Maureen’s footsteps disappear back into the kitchen.

In her room she looks down at her top. She moves in front of the mirror, and stares at her reflection. It is the same. The exact same. She takes her hands and makes two bunches from her almost black hair. She holds them at the side of her head and they hang loosely from her palms.

‘Exactly the same,’ she whispers. Under the blouse, her heart is racing.