Camilla is a cold fish. She would’ve stabbed Greg a second time. Maybe more, I’m convinced of it. Perhaps she was more furious at being dumped than she let on. Did she feel the same toward Charlie when she realized it wasn’t her he wanted, but me?

“Why did it end with your partner in Canada?”

It suddenly feels important that I know.

“He met someone else. We had a lot of bust-ups, which got physical. I had to get away.”

I feel cold, despite the second hot chocolate Camilla makes us.

I lie on the sofa back home with Jack in his chair beside me. Intermittently, he jerks awake before dozing off again. Felix and Emily watch Finding Nemo.

After Camilla’s revelations, when I discovered that the money Nina had been putting away was for a charity dedicated to helping the families of people missing abroad, I’d felt—just for a moment—so utterly, pathetically, grateful that she’d cared enough about me. Stupid of me to react like that because of course, it never was about me. It was about her guilt.

A memory resurfaces: Camilla lost her temper with an on/off boyfriend at art college. We were in the canteen one lunchtime and he wouldn’t immediately agree to the plans she was trying to make with him that night. She yanked the tray from his hands and dropped it. As we all stared at the congealed mess of food and the smashed white plate on the floor, she insisted it had been an accident. I can’t remember his name. Jake? Luke? They split up for good after that.

I doze. Snagged to a rock is silky, emerald moss, which frames Greg’s face as he stares up at me, incomprehension and utter betrayal written all over his features. I run, but my body doesn’t move. I hear Jack screaming, but when I rush to his cot, it’s empty.

I sit up so quickly that Felix and Emily gape. I must look frightening—my hair is all over the place and my hands are shaking.

Jack is perfectly quiet. His little chest rises and falls. The elder two are absorbed in clownfish, shrimp and turtles. Everything is calm.

Guilt festers, churning my insides, making me raw with fear and self-hatred. Every rattle of the letterbox, every ring of the doorbell, reinforces that I have no idea if I’m on borrowed time or not.

The news is delivered the following afternoon by Tamsin. Of course.

Snippets of (mostly false) news filter through over the days, reminding me, yet again, of Charlie. News, old and new, intertwines.

Back then it was the talk of the island. Apparently. There were various rumors when it was known that someone had drowned. It wasn’t clear initially whether it was a man or a woman.

Now it is: He slipped and fell, an accident, a robbery gone wrong, an ex out to get him, a heart attack, a stroke, a branch fell from a tree and hit his head. Stabbed, brutally murdered.