‘And don’t forget to give Claire a call. I think it’s something to do with selling the house; she needs your signature on something.’

Chloe nods and walks out of Park House towards the bus stop. She takes her phone out of her pocket as she sits down on the bus, scrolling through dozens of missed calls, the voicemails stacking up. She deletes one after another and instantly feels better to see them disappear from her inbox.

The bus weaves its way through the streets back into the city. Chloe glances from the top deck down into living room windows illuminated one by one in varying shades of indoor afternoon glow. In some, children, still fresh from school, sit cross-legged on sofas and floors in their uniforms, the blue light of the television flickering across their faces. There would have been a time when Chloe resented them this, being the other side of the glass to her. But now she has Maureen’s living room, and she knows that if someone peered into her back room – the brown swirl of the carpet, the teak sideboard, Chloe and Maureen sitting beside each other on the sofa – it would look just as natural as these.

The bus slows to let passengers on. Chloe looks down the side of the window, at the tops of heads – the odd child trailing home late in their school blazer. Her phone buzzes inside her pocket. Hollie.

Where are you? We did say four, didn’t we? xxx

Chloe taps out a reply, tells her she’s on her way. She’s concentrating, staring at her phone, so much so that she doesn’t notice the woman who sits down in the seat opposite, though intuitively she moves her legs to make way for her shopping bags. It’s only when the woman says her name that she looks up.

‘Chloe?’

If Chloe’s face looked blank for a second, she only wished she’d kept it that way. Because when she looks up, the recognition is immediately apparent. The mask slips. She feels it.

The old woman’s hand flies to her mouth.

‘I thought it was you.’

Chloe thinks fast, but it’s far too late to strip the recognition from her face. It’s much easier the other way round, to paint an expression on. Chloe knows that face opposite hers, of course she does. She would never forget the way her pink lipstick bleeds into the fine lines around her mouth, she can still remember all the gold rings adorning her fingers – the fascination she once faked in the stories behind every single one of them. The old woman’s face crinkles with confusion. Chloe almost sees her brain scrambling to make sense of the situation.

‘Chloe?’ she asks again.

And this time she has more time to answer, even to put on an accent.

‘Sorry?’