He hadn’t realized when he married Emily quite how different things would be compared to his life with Caro – after all, marriage is marriage, right? Wrong. Emily is completely different to Caro, and that comes as something of a relief to him. He knows he didn’t react very well on Christmas Day to the photograph appearing again, and then when Emily showed him the text message on her phone. How can he tell her that the last thing he wants is to get the police involved? The stress he felt when they descended on him after Caro died, the way they looked at him, asking questions about the most intimate parts of his life with Caro. Rupert isn’t sure he could go through that again, and he’s pretty sure that his relationship with Emily would suffer if they had to deal with the police as well. Thankfully, Emily hasn’t mentioned it again, and he’s hoping now that she has the kitten to keep her occupied, it will be enough to shed this (irrational – there, he’s said it) fear that someone is out to get them.

Rupert had spent an hour looking over Caro’s old Facebook photos on their return home after Christmas, telling Emily that he’d had work to do. It’s been a long time since he’s allowed himself to look at Caro’s pictures, guilt punching him in the stomach every time he looks at her, the curve of her jaw, the way her hair falls over one eye. The way she looked the last time he ever set eyes on her. He needed to do it, though, to remind himself that the life he’s making with Emily is the right one. She is what he was looking for, his missing piece after Caro died.

Since they’ve been home from his parents’, the atmosphere has been strained, with both of them on their best behaviour, as if they are roommates, not a married couple. The breathing space that has been afforded to Rupert by his return to work has given him a chance to think about things, and he’s come to a decision. He can’t let things with Emily go the way they did with Caro. By the time Caro died things were far from perfect between them, and he knows that a lot of it was his fault. Emily is his second chance, his chance to put right all the things that went wrong before. Looking down at the notepad on the desk in front of him, he realizes he has doodled a picture in biro of two hands joined together. A sign, surely, that deep down he knows he must make things work with Emily.