He opened his eyes and looked at her silently for a moment. A heavy weight settled across Rachel’s shoulders.

‘It’s probably going to make you angry,’ he said quietly. ‘At first I thought I could just not tell you, but that doesn’t feel right. I feel awful every time I see you, every time I think about you. I didn’t want to dredge up – I don’t want to make things—’

‘Toby,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is – come out and say it.’

‘I know why you never talk about your past,’ he said. ‘I know why you were on the road for so long, why you kept moving. Why you were running, and who you are still hiding from.’

He let the silence drift for a moment. Rachel said nothing, but his short statement instantly unravelled all the hope that had existed for her in the previous moments of the morning.

‘I wasn’t prying,’ he tried. ‘I… I saw a letter, that night I stayed late at the lighthouse. I was looking for a teaspoon, and there it was, in one of the drawers. It was addressed to Mrs Rachel Harry.’

It was as if Rachel had taken a breath and found herself to be drowning. In her mind she was no longer here. She had already absented herself: from this conversation, from Newton Dunbar, from this calm, quiet life that had been hers for five years but actually had never really been hers at all. She must have looked like a statue, standing there, staring at him. In her ears a siren was blaring; her blood, pulsing, pulsing.

‘I tried to forget it,’ Toby went on, as if talking would fill the void between them rather than making it worse. ‘I knew it was none of my business. It still isn’t. I know that. But when I was trying to work out who would have wanted that article written and why, I wondered whether it was someone who had something against you personally. Someone from your past. I searched the archives to see if there had ever been any newspaper reports involving a Mrs Rachel Harry. And… there were.’

He paused, as if expecting her to interject with some sort of explanation. She didn’t. She truly hated him in that moment. Then she just felt numb.

‘You’re a missing person,’ he said quietly.

‘No,’ Rachel said, and her voice sounded strange, as if someone else were speaking through her hoarse throat. ‘No. I was a missing person. I’m not anymore. Now I’m me.’

He nodded. She could tell that there were questions he wanted to ask. She knew how difficult it must be for him, whose entire adult life had been built around reconstructing the whole truth of a fragmented story. But she was the opposite. Her life – this brief part of her life, the only part that had actually been hers to live as she pleased – had been entirely dependent on being hidden. She turned for the door. He didn’t try to stop her.