It was seven years after the fire, seven years since Hannah told Emily that she was her sister, and what her father had done. Seven years since the day she disappeared. I don’t know how she found me here in such a remote spot – my old neighbours, I suppose, or perhaps the clinic where I worked passed on my new address. She knocked on the door one afternoon out of the blue. I remember my stomach dropped like a stone to see her standing there – I recognized her immediately from the day I’d followed Hannah to Suffolk, when she was pretending to be ‘Becky’. ‘Emily,’ I said. ‘You’re Emily Lawson, aren’t you? What are you doing here?’ It was as though a ghost had appeared on my doorstep. Deep down I had always believed that, like Doug and Toby, she was dead too, another of Hannah’s victims.

‘May I come in?’ she asked. She had Rose’s clear blue eyes, Oliver’s thick dark hair, such a very pretty girl – or woman, I should say; she was twenty-five years old by then.

She said she knew who I was, that I was the woman who’d brought Hannah up, the woman whose husband and son Hannah had murdered. She told me she was living in France now, scraping by as a waitress in a hotel.

Of course I invited her in, and we sat together in my kitchen. ‘Do your parents know where you are?’ I asked. I had seen Rose briefly after the fire, before I moved up here, so I knew how desperate she was to find her daughter still, though I hadn’t spoken to her since, not once in seven years.

Emily hesitated, and looked down at her hands. ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘I haven’t spoken to them since I left.’

‘Aren’t you going to see them? Aren’t you going to tell them where you are? That you’re OK?’

She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I miss them all so much,’ she said. ‘But I felt I couldn’t go back, not after what my father did. I can’t go back and pretend it never happened, that I don’t know about Hannah, that I don’t know how he gave away his own baby. I couldn’t live with it, keeping their awful secret for them, letting my brothers grow up not knowing they had a half-sister somewhere.’

I nodded. ‘But why are you here, Emily? Why have you come to see me after all this time?’

‘Because …’ she glanced down and, following her eyes to the curve of her belly, the penny dropped. ‘You’re pregnant,’ I said.

She gazed at me with those beautiful blue eyes. ‘I was going to stay away. But it doesn’t feel right, now. I want my family to know I have a child.’ She began to cry.

‘Then go to them,’ I said.