She nodded dumbly, head bowed. ‘There’s something else,’ she said, and paused for what seemed like a very long time. Eventually she added softly, ‘I lied to you, Finch.’

He held his breath. His heart was flapping like a flag in a storm. No, no, please, no, he thought. Don’t let this whole thing about Michael be some terrible invention. He stared apprehensively at his stepdaughter, trying to fathom from her expression what she was about to reveal. But Grace wasn’t looking at him. When she did begin to speak again, she simply sounded resigned and infinitely weary.

‘When I said I didn’t tell Mum, I wasn’t being quite honest.’ She drained her glass and set it down gently on the table. ‘It was true I didn’t, but she already knew at least some of it. From James Bregman.’ Letting out a long sigh, Grace continued, her eyes filling with tears, ‘But she didn’t believe me when I told her my version of what happened.’

‘What?’ Finch spat the word out as if it were choking him.

‘James must have said it was just a kiss, made out it was consensual or something.’ Grace spoke very quietly, so Finch could barely make out her next words, the rest lost as Grace began to sob.

He got up and came round the table, sat on a chair beside her and put his arm round her shoulders until she quietened down a little. She turned her face towards him.

‘It wasn’t Mum’s fault, Finch. James spun her what must have been Michael’s account and she believed him. We weren’t getting on back then, of course. She thought I was drinking too much, hanging out with the wrong crowd. I was judgemental about her having a thing with a married man …’

‘A married man?’

Grace nodded. ‘James.’ She looked at him curiously. ‘Didn’t you know?’

Finch’s head was spinning. So that’s what Jenny’s sly comments implied, he thought. An affair with a married man? Nell had always been incredibly disapproving – as a woman who’d been on the receiving end of infidelity with Grace’s father – about people who did that. No wonder she didn’t tell me. The biggest shock for him, though, was that Nell had known about Michael’s attack. ‘I can’t believe your mum took James’s word over yours,’ he said, remembering the girl’s heart-wrenching narrative that night. He blinked hard, as if trying to clear away this new image that was emerging about the woman he had always idolized.

Grace let out a tired sigh.

‘So what exactly did she say?’