The first article that came up was about the missing schoolgirl Genette Tate. That was back in 1978, nowhere near the time she’d put in the search bar. But nonetheless it made her shudder. She remembered her own parents, their friends, teachers, villagers – all talking about this case when she was growing up – it’d happened a year before Louisa’s birth. Louisa recalled how she’d been out riding her bike with a few of her friends when she was ten, and her mum had given her the usual warning: don’t stop and talk to anyone you don’t know, stick together with the other girls, don’t cycle off ahead, or let them leave you behind. You know what happened to Genette Tate. Yes, she did. It was ingrained in her mind. The girl had been thirteen years old, and had gone missing during her paper round. Scattered newspapers had been found alongside her abandoned bike in the quiet country lane near her village in East Devon.

Louisa’s mind now conjured the image of the country lane she’d been driving down, of the body in the middle of it. Lying still, broken, bloodied. She wondered if something similar had happened to Genette. If someone like Louisa had hit her, killed her, then covered it up. Before yesterday Louisa would’ve never imagined any scenario where she could’ve done such a thing. But from one day to the next, she was realising that she wasn’t the person she thought she was.

Clicking off the article, Louisa scrolled down the search results. UK Missing Persons Unit was at the bottom of the first page. Louisa tried searching, but the pages were mainly to do with unidentified case searches – for bodies of people who’d been found but were yet to be identified. She cursed herself for feeling relief when there were no unidentified females found in Devon that could relate to her woman in the lane.

Nevertheless, Louisa couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling. It wasn’t just that she’d found out what she’d done, what the traumatic experience that had clouded her adult life was, it was why. Why had she allowed Oliver to cover it up? And why was Oliver back?

He had a hidden agenda. He must have.

Louisa thought about his marriage to Melissa – it was new, but was it happy? Perhaps marrying her triggered something in him. Maybe Emily was right, and he’d come back to Devon for Louisa.

It was possible that the lie he’d lived with was too much to bear on his own, and it wasn’t exactly something he could tell his new bride. Guilt could eat away at you. Destroy you. Keeping such a huge secret would certainly not be the basis of a good marriage.

Louisa had managed it, but that was before. There was no telling how this would affect her marriage now. Now she knew the devastating truth.