I gaped at him. ‘Me? I wanted? Doug, we both did.’ He shook his head and got to his feet. ‘Please, Doug, please don’t go.’ I started to cry.

He stopped, his back to me, he was very still and quiet, and then with a sudden movement, he went quickly from the room. I heard the front door slam shut. He didn’t come back until many hours later, drunk and silent and still too furious even to look at me.

We barely spoke in the following days. I made the appointment with the GP, who referred me to a child psychologist in Cambridge who had a waiting list of several weeks. The loneliness in the days after my talk with Doug was unbearable. I sank deeper and deeper inside myself, brooding over things that should have been left firmly in the past. I knew there was only one person who could help me – the same person who’d provided all the answers once before; who knew our secret, as we knew theirs. It would be such a relief to talk about it, like lancing a wound that had been allowed to fester too long. Of course, I knew Doug would never agree, would be horrified at the very idea of us being in contact again – yet the more I fantasized about making the phone call, the more desperate I became to do it.

8

London, 2017

After Mac had left, his revelation ringing in her ears, Clara sat motionless on the sofa, her shock so absolute that, for now at least, she felt nothing, the world stripped of sound and sensation, like the aftermath of an explosion. But she knew the pain was coming; could sense the tsunami swelling on the horizon, gathering strength, waiting to break.

Her gaze fell to the photograph of her and Luke on Hampstead Heath, her face turned so lovingly towards his, her eyes shining with happiness. Idiot. She thought now of all the hundreds of times when he’d appeared to love her. Which of those had been a lie? When had he started to be dissatisfied with her, to begin to draw away, look elsewhere?

She remembered their first date. A hazy summer’s evening on the South Bank when suddenly he’d taken her hand and led her away from the crowds, the street performers, the bookstalls, the bars and restaurants, down mossy stone steps to the river’s bank, where small groups huddled on the silty sand, smoke rising from a campfire, music from a busker’s guitar, the lights of the embankment trailing across the river’s surface, the last of the sun falling behind the city’s skyline. And when he’d kissed her she’d never felt so deliriously, stupidly happy. Not an expert in these things, she had fallen too deeply, too quickly, entirely forgetting to keep a part of herself back, to put a lifejacket on in case of emergency.