‘It’s not mine, it’s Edna’s. She lent it to me because I haven’t got any of my own clothes here. I must have left them in my old house.’

This happened the other day, when Nan couldn’t see the fitted cupboard doors in her room. She’d been wearing the same clothes for three days before anyone thought to show her the clothes hanging neatly inside her wardrobe. In the end one of the care assistants took a photograph of them and stuck it on the outside.

‘Do you not have a photo stuck on your wardrobe door anymore, Nan?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Do you—’ she sighs. ‘Nothing.’

Chloe also knows that we all have reasons for ignoring the truth sometimes, when a story we tell ourselves or others sounds better. The Kyles must have done it over the years, told themselves a story to make the truth more palatable. She wonders where they might have started.

Chloe hasn’t been back to the cemetery for four days. She’s done what Hollie said. But she hasn’t been to the recruitment agencies either. Instead, she’s been here, hiding in this timeless no-man’s land.

‘It’s your move, dear,’ Nan says. ‘Dear?’

‘Oh, sorry,’ Chloe says.

Nan doesn’t look up from her cards. She has a look of concentration on her face, the same, Chloe decides, as she had when she studied her word-search book while Chloe sat cross-legged at her feet as a child, gazing up at her cartoons until her neck ached and she switched to lying on her front. Stella must have been out working then; she had a job in a local pub so Chloe stayed with Nan and Granddad on those nights. She’d sometimes hear her come in late at night, whispers from the hall floating up the stairs. ‘Has she been OK?’ she’d ask, and then, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mum.’ Then a few moments later, a perfumed kiss in the dark.

Or that’s how Chloe likes to remember it.

She puts down a card and looks up at Nan again.

‘I’ve been working on a story at the office recently,’ she says, forgetting for a second she’s meant to be the cleaner.

‘Remind me, what is it you do, Chloe, dear?’

Chloe is relieved to realize Nan has forgotten too.

‘The newspaper,’ she says.

‘Oh yes, a reporter.’

‘Yes, and I . . . I’ve been working on a new story.’

‘What’s that about then, dear?’

‘It’s quite sad really, a little girl who went missing.’

‘Oh, how dreadful.’

‘Yes, she was only four.’

‘Where did they lose her?’

‘At a park. Not far from here actually.’

She looks up. ‘London?’

‘No, Nan, we’re in Peterborough.’