‘But you’re so young for—’

‘A second marriage? I know. We got married at university.’

‘That’s still very young.’

‘I thought it was the right thing to do at the time. I’d recently suffered a great loss and was struggling to cope, and marrying him seemed . . . well, I thought it was a way to be safe.’

‘Safe from what?’ Señora Quincy asked, watching her closely.

Charlotte was quiet for a moment. ‘My past. My family. My destiny.’ She stared at her hands, spying a tiny white crescent moon in the pinks of her fingernail, still able to hear her mother’s words in the bathroom that night. She gave a sigh. ‘My family is . . . prominent. Like yours, it’s a name everyone knows and they all want a piece of you, the glamour by proxy.’

Marina gave a tiny gasp of understanding. ‘So that’s why you do this. You know what it’s like,’ she said quietly.

Charlotte nodded. ‘People on the outside have no idea of what it’s like to be born into a family with no purpose, no rules, no limits. No one ever said “no” to me, or even “later” – I could have whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. But the problem with that is when you can have everything, you value nothing. It was my problem – and it was my father’s too.’

‘It was him you lost,’ Señora Quincy said, presenting it as a fact.

She nodded. ‘He’d had a drug problem for a long time. My mother had finally had enough. She was leaving him . . . I found him.’ She pressed her lips together firmly, taking another breath. ‘And the papers loved it. As far as they were concerned, the story was heaven-sent – rich and sordid and wasted and debauched. They trailed us everywhere for months. Some of my friends who I thought were protecting me, I found out later were selling stories about me to the press. There was nobody I could trust.’ She stared into the distance, remembering it again, the moment he’d batted away her games, seen through her act. ‘Except one. He kept himself apart, he wasn’t like the rest. He wasn’t from my world and he didn’t care about that stuff. He just seemed to like . . . me.’ Her voice cracked on the last word.

‘So what happened?’ Marina asked, her jaw slack with concern.

She shrugged. ‘I messed it up, I was papering over the cracks. I loved him but I hadn’t come to terms with my father’s death and the more I loved him, the more frightening it felt. Everyone thought I was with him for the sheer novelty, my mother, my friends, they all told me it was some sort of rebellion – me trying on a different life. And the more they said it, the more I began to believe they were right, that he was just another obsession and that in trying to escape being like my father, I had become more like him than ever.’