Mark’s fingers brush mine but we don’t hold hands. It is enough that he’s beside me, enough that we’re talking. The house has been on the market for three weeks. I don’t know what we’ll do when it sells. We might buy a smaller place together. We might choose to live apart. I might go to nursing college. I might not. Billy’s disappearance revealed a lot about my relationship with my husband – good and bad – and I need to decide what I can live with and what I can’t. I’m certain Mark was telling me the truth when he said he had no idea why Billy had defaced the photo album and that he didn’t have the strength for another argument, not when there were so many other things stressing him out. But he did lie when I asked him if he knew where it was. And he tried to kiss another woman. I need to decide whether I can forgive him for that and whether I would be happier with or without him. But there’s no hurry to make that kind of decision. There are some things you can’t force. Some things only time will reveal.

‘Do you think Jake will be okay?’ Mark asks as we walk past a faded sign offering one donkey ride for £3, two for a fiver.

‘Just a second.’ I dip down to undo my shoes. When I shake them out there’s half a sandcastle’s worth of sand in each one.

‘Jake will be fine,’ I say as we continue to walk. Mark in his trainers, me barefoot, despite the biting November wind. ‘Living with mates will be good for him. They won’t let him wallow.’

It’s a new start for him. A clean slate. I drove to Chew Valley the day after we saw Kira in the hospital and I threw the tote and knife into the lake. There are days when I wonder whether it was the right decision, whether I should have told DS Forbes about the paedophile Jake met. He might have been jailed, taken off the streets so he couldn’t go looking for other boys. Or Jake might have been the one that ended up behind bars. It was a risk I couldn’t take. Not after everything he’d been through.

‘Practically, I mean.’ Mark says. ‘He’s never so much as boiled an egg. You’ll have to give him lessons.’

‘He’d love that –’ I smile – ‘his mum popping round in her pinny! Honestly, Mark, he’ll be fine. He’s made of stern stuff.’

He gives me a sideways glance. ‘Like you.’