Four days.

I pace the living room – treading the same path over and over – a zoo animal.

Trapped.

Watched.

Carly rushes up the driveway. I open the door to usher her inside, as she’s trailed by the shouts of a reporter who has been loitering outside our house all morning.

‘Carly! Is it true he’s out? How do you feel?’

Carly says to me, ‘How does he fucking think I feel?’ She slams the door behind her. Her face is pale. Eyes tinged pink. Although I only saw her two days ago, she seems smaller. Thinner. Shrinking under the weight of the past or shrinking away from the present. Perhaps both.

She doesn’t sit or take off her coat. Instead she smooths out an identical letter onto the kitchen table, which is still lemon-cleaner-damp from where George had wiped away the remnants of Archie’s breakfast. Although my fingers are now encased in gloves, I don’t pick the piece of paper up.

‘What do you think it means?’ I ask when what I really want to know is who does she think sent it but I’m scared that her answer will match the one that is marching around my head.

Him.

‘I… I don’t know.’

‘It sounds like a warning.’ A warning of what, I do not know. Nothing could be worse than it was twenty years ago, but as I catch sight of the photo of George, Archie and I at the theme park I know that things can be unimaginably worse. ‘Do you think Marie got one too?’ She must have. ‘I still haven’t managed to catch her on the phone to tell her.’

He’s out.

‘Leah. Breathe.’ I feel Carly rubbing my back. Suddenly the breath that had been stuck in my throat bursts from me. I sink heavily onto a chair.

‘It’s happening again.’ The eight-year-old inside of me begins to cry.

‘It isn’t.’ She falls back into big-sister mode. ‘It’s probably just some crackpot – you know how people get and there’s been extra media coverage this year.’

‘George thinks it’s a journalist trying to create a story.’

‘There you go then.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Her eyes won’t meet mine. I know she doesn’t believe it any more than I do.

We take my car, since Carly’s car is full of parcels and her latest charity-shop finds. I don’t feel entirely safe behind the wheel. I don’t feel entirely safe anywhere.

Marie doesn’t answer the buzzer. I rattle the door handle as though it might suddenly open.

It doesn’t.

The letterbox is striped with duct tape from where it had fallen off last time I came and I can’t open it to peep through.

‘She’s not here,’ Carly says.

‘We can’t just leave. I want to make sure she’s okay.’ Not passed out drunk on the floor.

Carly stamps her feet, her breath billowing a cloud. ‘Right, well…’ I look at her expectantly but before she can come up with a plan, there’s a click. A man with a beanie pulled low over his head rushes past us without acknowledgement. Carly thrusts her foot in the door before it can properly shut.