A few days after they’d met at the bar, Emily contacted Clara again, asking if she could meet her somewhere private. And though she was elated to hear from her, Clara’s heart sank when she realized that the only possible place she could take her to was her own flat – Mac, after all, was not supposed to know about their meeting. The memory of her last visit there, that strange, eerie sense of being watched, the sudden, terrifying burst of music exploding down the stairwell still haunted her, and she sat for a long moment in Mac’s living room, staring down at Emily’s message before she typed her reply.

She was grateful the following afternoon as she let herself into her building that Emily had at least agreed to meet in daylight. When she reached her door she paused and listened, glancing fearfully up to Alison’s floor, but all was silent now. She busied herself with tidying up, thankful that she wouldn’t be alone for too long.

Sure enough, Emily arrived on the dot of two. When she opened the door Clara was struck afresh by her similarity to Luke, the almost identical way they smiled; the exact shade of their eyes. She watched Emily as she moved around the living room, her fingers trailing over shelves and ornaments as she drank everything in. When she came to the photograph of Luke and Clara, she picked it up and studied it. ‘Tell me about my brother,’ she said. ‘Tell me what he’s like now. He was such a lovely little boy, so kind and funny and loving. Is he still like that?’

And Clara heard herself replying, ‘Yes, yes he is,’ because, despite the disturbing things she’d learnt about him over the past few days, the Luke she’d known had been kind and funny and loving – at least to her.

‘We were so close when we were kids,’ Emily said wistfully. ‘What sort of man is he now?’

So Clara told her everything she could think of: how Luke had travelled around Asia in his gap year, the university he’d gone to, the friends he’d made, his career, the music and books he liked. She told her about the Luke who made the best roasted sea bass she’d ever tasted and did the worst impression of Michael Jackson she’d ever seen, the Luke who cared about his friends and his family, and her.

Emily listened avidly, her legs curled up beneath her where she sat on the sofa next to Clara, her head resting on her arms, her quiet, thoughtful gaze upon her face. ‘You love him very much, don’t you?’ she said, and mutely Clara nodded. Outside on the street the thudding bass of a car stereo swelled then faded, a child cried out one long, plaintive wail, yet up here all was quiet and still.