Despite being more open with Will during our conversation yesterday than I’ve ever been, I didn’t tell him about the message on the computer saying that Daisy was still alive, or about the note – I slipped that deep into the middle of the filing tray on the Welsh dresser in my kitchen. I also managed to slip the school exercise book I’d borrowed into his briefcase, stuffing it amongst the rest of his marking, without him noticing. I shared some things with Will last night, but not all.

I told him my real name, but only the bare bones of my story. I told him why we’d chosen to go to Nepal. I told him how excited we all were when we first arrived at Ekanta Yatra. I told him how glorious our first couple of days there were, how we swam in the river, splashed each other in the waterfall, read books in hammocks and drank beers around the fire. I told him how things started to change, how we changed, how dangerous the place became. I didn’t go into detail about what happened with Isaac or Frank. I didn’t tell him about Ruth or Gabe or Johan. I told him that I’d been scared, more scared than I’d ever been in my life, and he held me as I talked and stroked my hair away from my face. He kept saying that it was all over now and that it was okay to cry and let it all out, but my eyes stayed dry.

It’s not all over, no matter how many times Will tells me it is.

I lay awake for hours last night, turning everything over in my mind as Will slumbered beside me. It was the fear that unsettled me the most – the way that fear had revved from zero to one hundred the second Joan’s cupboard door slammed shut. One minute I was in the present, staring at the carcass of her dead dog, realising the situation had just escalated to something prosecutable, and the next I was sucked back into the past, reliving the most terrifying moment of my life. Until then, I’d fooled myself into believing that I’d locked all that away, that I’d filed it in a box in my head marked “Do Not Open”, but the note unlocked it all. And someone out there is determined it stays that way.

I must have slept at some point last night because Will’s mobile alarm startled me awake just after six this morning. He got up, and grabbed his T-shirt from the neat pile on the chair beside the bed. When we first started dating, he’d toss his clothes onto the floor with abandon, but my neat-freakery has changed all that.