Maybe. Allison tried to convince herself she was right, but she couldn’t shake the feeling there was something suspicious about the relationship with Jo. She sat at the dining room table with her coffee and laptop. It didn’t take long; she wasn’t in too many Facebook groups. She went into each, used the search option and viewed every post and every comment she’d made since she’d joined. It took a couple of hours, her expression settling into grim lines as she realised how much personal information she’d given out in dribs and drabs over the years. It would have been easy for someone determined to have discovered Allison was originally from Oxford, that she was an accountant and what books she enjoyed.

She went back over the comments Jo posted, the messages she’d sent, from the first I hope you don’t mind me contacting you but… to the comments where she’d casually dropped a reference to being from Oxford, to her husband being a solicitor… lots of laughing emojis about the number of coincidences. All done over months, carefully, coolly, reeling the usually suspicious Allison in little by little.

Jo had gone to a lot of trouble… and spent a lot of time. It was clear she wanted something, but what?

And why now?

The relaxing evening Allison had planned was spoilt. Restlessly, she rinsed the plates they’d used and slipped them into the dishwasher. Then, because she suddenly felt hungry, she took out the tiramisu, leaned against the counter and used a teaspoon to eat it from the container. The luscious sweetness had a calming effect. When every morsel was scraped out, she tossed container and spoon into the sink.

Determined to keep her hard-earned calmness intact, she decided a glass of wine and a book would be the perfect finish to the evening. A good book… only then did she remember the book Peter had been reading was one she’d been looking forward to reading herself. It was satisfying to be able to blame Jo for her panicked rush to get rid of the bag of rubbish. Allison was almost amused at the effect stress was having on her usual calm approach to life. The life she’d planned for herself.

She switched on the outside lights and went to retrieve the rubbish bag. The bin was almost full; the bag she’d dropped into it a short time before should have been sitting on top. It wasn’t.

Panic lashed her and she fumbled with the other bags, opening one after the other, staring at the detritus of their daily life, ignoring the whiff that oozed from a couple, retying them and dropping them to the ground until she was surrounded by a sea of baggy blackness, tilting the wheelie bin in order to reach the last item, knowing as she struggled to untie it, she wasn’t going to see what she wanted.