I had put it all together since stealing his phone and meeting Lisa Ragozzi. Nick wasn’t a dupe, even if Suzi treated him like one. Far from it, he knew exactly what she’d been up to. He watched her through cameras, knew when she entered and left the house, so it was quite likely he’d also been monitoring her phone. It was astonishing how many people had Find My Friends – tracking software, essentially – turned on and didn’t even know or care. He might even have cloned her phone so he could read her messages – I had read that you could do that quite easily, just by sending a link to the phone. Perhaps he’d been planning to confront her about it, her second affair, before she said she was pregnant. Patrick couldn’t father a child, so it was Nick’s, whether he knew that for sure or not, and a baby was likely what he’d wanted ever since he’d tried to persuade Lisa – a college student! – that she should have one.

I could see the plan clearly, as if I’d made it myself. Suzi was almost seven months pregnant now. All he had to do was keep her somewhere until she went into labour – somewhere safe and warm, no point causing distress to the baby by making it a nasty place – then when she had the child, get rid of her somehow. It didn’t even have to be murder. He’d laid the groundwork so well, taking her to the doctors, reporting her anxiety and hallucinations. Documenting her panicked racing around the country, her long walks in the cold, her weeping for hours. I imagined he would have her put away, in some nice safe hospital, the kind of place where I’d stuck my mother. Then divorce her, and who would give custody of a baby to a crazy woman? She would have antenatal scans booked, yes, and appointments, but perhaps he could tell them she’d moved practices. Or scare her enough that she’d never say a word, even if he let her out and she got her chance to tell someone. There were women who lived like that for years. Even me, I had lived in a cage I thought was perfect.