‘Rachel,’ he said softly. ‘You have nothing to apologize for.’

‘It’s… what I left behind back there… I thought I’d finally reached a point where I never had to think about it.’

‘You don’t have to explain,’ Toby said. ‘Really, you don’t. I felt bad the moment I searched for your name. I completely understand that I crossed a line and you can’t forgive that.’

There was another brief silence and he wondered if this was really it – the last time they would ever talk to each other. The last time they would ever be connected, even if it was only by an open phone line.

‘It’s not a long story,’ she said, then. ‘Or a complicated one, or even an uncommon one. But it’s mine and if you’re going to know it, I want you to hear it from me. Not what he told those papers. Not his version of it. Mine. That’s important to me, Toby. Do you understand?’

He smiled, though she couldn’t see him and it wouldn’t have looked like a happy expression even if she could. ‘Yes,’ Toby said. ‘I do.’

He went up to the bookshop because by then it was after hours and there was no way he’d make her do this either amid the noise of the pub or the white quiet of his cottage where his fateful revelation had taken place. They sat at the chess table, she in Cullen’s chair and he in Ron’s, and Toby found himself wondering what would happen to this furniture, so perfectly at home where it was at that moment. Would it end up in a skip? That was such a terrible, lonely thought.

Rachel was right, it wasn’t a long story, mainly because her life had barely begun when it started, and then there he was.

‘They’d call it grooming now,’ Rachel said, her nails scraping against the tattered arms of Cullen’s chair. ‘Every time I hear that word it makes me feel sick. He started waiting around for me after school, outside the school gates. I guess I was fifteen, sixteen? Gilly’s age, as it turns out. I’ve no idea how he chose me, except they can always tell, can’t they, that kind of man? How to pick the most vulnerable of us. The ones with no one to care.’

Rachel had been in and out of foster placements and group homes since her mother had died when she was six. Her father had never been around and by then her grandfather was dead and her grandmother was in a care home, slowly losing her mind to dementia.

‘It’s a difficult age to place,’ Rachel said, with a matter-of-factness that made Toby’s heart invert itself. ‘And I was a difficult child anyway, or at least so I was told. There was home after home, placement after placement, but no adoption and no permanence. When Steven turned up, when he actually showed me attention and listened to me – or made it seem as if he was, anyway – well, I didn’t have a chance, really. He wanted to marry me, he said, and that was the clincher, obviously. Because no man would want to get married unless it actually meant something, would they? Especially not a man like that – older, so sure of himself, so smart. He wasn’t a loner, or a weirdo, or anything like that. He was a builder, he made good money and knew how to handle himself. He obviously didn’t need me, so he must want me, and it had been a long time since I’d been wanted by anyone. We got married as soon as it was legal. And then I found out that I hadn’t escaped anything at all, I’d just run from one mess straight into another.’