‘Only I don’t think I could bear it if it happened again.’

She only worried because her attraction to him felt similar to the way she had felt with Tim – insecure; scared that this all-consuming love might not be reciprocated, that she was being toyed with again. She felt him withdrawing and decided to reveal more, to pique his interest.

‘I have a few mementos.’ She sat up and pulled the covers over her, hunching over her knees. ‘I wanted proof of where she came from, so I pulled out some of her baby hairs.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘She screamed like crazy, but I have her DNA.’

The revelation has the desired effect. ‘Clever girl.’

‘I didn’t feel particularly clever,’ she grumbled. ‘I felt like an idiot. I’ll never forgive either of them.’

‘Either of them?’

‘Nick too. But that’s another story.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Are you interrogating me?’

She hopped out of bed and went into the bathroom, turned on the tap and angled her mouth beneath it. Her face was still flushed and her eyes bright. She splashed her cheeks with cold water and dried them with a towel.

‘I want to know everything about you,’ Douglas said.

How far could she trust him? She barely knew him. But Douglas wasn’t Tim and she had to talk to someone about what happened. It had been poisoning her for so long. She crawled back under the blankets and snuggled up to him, closing her eyes tight.

‘Talk to me, Anna. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.’

She hugged her arms around her knees above the duvet. ‘The reason Izzy ran down to the river was because something had upset her, had scared and shaken her so much that she wasn’t in her right mind. Before she went, she told me she had been hiding with Nick. She was trembling from head to toe, and she looked like a ghost.’

She felt Douglas’s body tense.

‘What are you saying?’ His voice had bite in it. The loving quality had gone.

‘We’d been playing this silly game, pretending Nick didn’t exist. Izzy didn’t like it and would sneak off and spend time with him when she thought no one was watching. But I knew. I suppose they got close and Nick misinterpreted the signals and took things too far. He was a very troubled teenager.’

Why did she add that last lie? He wasn’t troubled, at least not before that summer. Had she really been that powerful? It seemed extraordinary now.