He sighs. ‘So I went along with it all, I went along with the appeals in the newspaper, the certainty that our little girl would one day come home. Hell, I even went along with it when she was so convinced that you were her, but in here’ – he pats his chest – ‘I knew you weren’t her, and I had this anger, this utter resentment that not only had I suffered so much but now I was being goaded for it, and when you started saying you’d had a dream and I just realized how utterly stupid the whole thing . . . perhaps I did want to confess to you, I wanted you to know that I thought the whole fecking thing was crazy, because I’d tried telling Maureen and . . .’

He drops his head into his hands.

‘Does it sound strange to you? Does it? That perhaps I wanted you to put an end to it once and for all . . . I don’t know.’ He sweeps his hands over his face and sighs. ‘I don’t know.’

Chloe sits alongside him. The road and the fields are completely black now. Not a single car has passed in all this time. It is cold and so she shuts her passenger door. Patrick does the same, then switches the interior light back on. He turns to her.

Chloe swallows in the darkness, then tries to speak: ‘But I don’t understand . . . I mean, an affair? That was it? You could have told Maureen, people forgive people who—’

‘You don’t understand, Chloe.’

‘So tell me,’ she says. ‘Because whatever you’d done, whatever you said you—’

‘Because it was Josie, all right? Because the woman I was having an affair with was Maureen’s best friend. We were the two people who had to pick up the pieces after Angie disappeared. How was I meant to tell her what we’d done? The two people who she needed more than anyone.’

‘Josie?’ Chloe gasps. She’d convinced herself Josie hated Patrick, that perhaps she even suspected him like she did.

‘Did she know? Did she search for Angie with you?’

Patrick shakes his head. ‘She’d left by the time I turned around and realized Angie was gone . . . I searched for her myself, and when I told everyone she’d disappeared from the park, well, Josie knew that’s where we were going afterwards . . . I lied to everyone, Chloe, just to keep my family together when it had already fallen apart.’

He sinks back against his seat and stares at the roof of the car. Chloe has noticed that the windows have steamed up now. Nobody could see in, or out.

‘But Josie?’ Chloe says finally. ‘How could you?’

Patrick turns to her quickly. ‘We all have secrets, Chloe,’ he says. ‘What about you and all those newspaper clippings?’

Chloe looks at him quickly at the mention of her archive. So he had seen it.