Brody paused then, and Anna could hear him dragging in a few ragged breaths, but she kept her promise. She let him talk.

‘I stood up and looked around, expecting to see her bending over a flower or grinning at me from under the table, but she was nowhere. I called her name, started to walk down the lawn, looking for a flash of her red T-shirt, which should have stood out wonderfully against all that green, but I couldn’t see anything but flowers and grass and shrubs.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And the pond…’

Anna clamped her hand over her mouth. She wanted to drop the phone and run away but she made herself sit there. Brody needed her. He needed her to listen to this. Oh, Anna, be careful what you wish for…

Brody’s voice became even tighter. ‘The pond was covered in duckweed, exactly the same shade of green as the lawn, and to a two-year-old, it might have looked just like grass. I started running, and when I reached the edge of the pond, I could see a hole in the duckweed, ripples in the water…’

Anna began to cry. She made sure to do it silently so Brody wouldn’t hear her.

‘I started grabbing at the water blindly, but the pond was probably three- or four- feet deep at the edge and got even deeper towards the middle. I couldn’t find her, Anna. I couldn’t find her, not quickly enough, anyway…’

Anna swallowed. She waited until she was sure that Brody had finished his story, or at least as much of it as he could say, before she asked a question. She knew she was probably asking the obvious, but she had to do it. After so many months of mystery, she needed to know for sure. ‘Did you get her out?’

He cleared his throat and waited a few seconds before carrying on. ‘Yes. Before the paramedics arrived – my mother had come out with the tea tray just as I pulled Lena out of the pond and laid her on the grass. She dropped the tray, teapot and all, and ran back inside the house to phone them. But it was at least a twenty-minute drive from the nearest town, and I could tell from the looks on their faces when they finally arrived that there was no hope. Even though I’d been doing my best with CPR.’

He broke off and all Anna could do was stare at the empty sky beyond the concrete posts of the car park. Her vocal cords were frozen shut. Brody had always had the right thing to say when she’d poured her soul out to him, and now she couldn’t even say a single word of comfort back to him. Some friend she was.

‘Did you know that a child can drown in under a minute?’ he asked, but Anna wouldn’t have replied if her voice had been working, because it almost seemed as if he was lost in his own words at this point, and he didn’t really need her answer. ‘And that after a certain point, even if they’re still alive, their body shuts down, making CPR much less likely to be effective?’