‘So, I’m going to tell you my last name,’ she finished. ‘And where I live.’

The silence at the other end of the line changed. As if he was no longer smiling to himself. As if he was frowning. Wary.

Why?

‘My name is Anna Barry and I live in south-east London. Bromley, to be exact. Well, not actually in Bromley town centre, more Sundridge Park…’ She was babbling now. ‘And I’m going to send you a picture…’

Was she? Where had that come from?

But the moment she’d said it, she knew it was the right decision. If Brody couldn’t – or wouldn’t – FaceTime, this was the next best thing. She wanted to have a mental image of him when she talked to him, not this fuzzy, shifting idea in her head made up entirely from her imagination, and she wanted him to be able to picture her too. She wanted him to know who she was on the outside the way he knew her on the inside.

She switched her phone to speaker and navigated to where her photos were stored so that she could choose one to text him. Was it weird that in all the time they’d been communicating, they hadn’t once sent a written message? It had always been talking. Voices.

‘Anna? You really don’t need to…’

Anna wasn’t listening. She was too busy scrolling down her photo library, trying to find the right one to send to him. The nicest pictures of her were way at the top, quite a few of them with Spencer, and her vanity almost made her want to select one of those, but she paused before she tapped the screen. No. This wasn’t like choosing a picture for an Instagram-perfect display that bore no resemblance at all to real life. This was Brody. She needed to find one that showed who she was now, wrinkles and all, one that was honest.

‘I’m going to have to hang up,’ she told him. ‘I can’t work out how to do this without cutting you off. Phone me back when you’ve got it.’

She ended the call before he could protest and chose a photo of herself taken some time in the last year. She wasn’t being cute or sexy (not that she was sure that she knew how to take a selfie that was cute and sexy). It was a snap Gabi had taken during a walk in the fields around Farnborough one Saturday morning in February. She’d called Anna’s name and had taken the photograph the moment Anna had turned her head. She was staring straight at the camera, a half-smile on her lips and weariness in her eyes that said: You’re really doing that now? It was very her. All the better for having been caught in the moment.

She tapped her phone to select it and then, before she could talk herself out of it, she pressed Send and it was gone. She held her breath and waited.