‘The village pub. The Black Horse. Must have been, oh … last week sometime?’ She looks at my face. ‘Oh shit, have I put my foot in it?’

‘No, not at all.’ I rearrange my features, leaning down and fussing with the baby before pasting a smile on and straightening up. ‘I sent Rav out for a bit, told Naomi to meet him so he wasn’t a billy no mates. Just celebrating this little one, that’s all.’

‘Oh, phew.’ Tara pretends to swipe sweat from her brow. ‘You should have seen your face – I thought I’d put my foot right in it!’

Tara chatters on about everything and nothing as we walk the last few metres to the preschool, but I don’t hear a thing she says. All I can see is Rav telling me he was working late, that the case was a nightmare. And now I know he was with Naomi, just like he was the night Mina was ill. I wonder if that was when they first decided that something wasn’t quite right. I wonder if that’s when they decided they were going to take the children.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Rav is home early, just as he said he would be, but I busy myself with the children and at dinner the air between us feels crackly and tense. I don’t trust myself to speak, so I don’t, not directly anyway – I find myself doing that awful thing that I swore I never would – using Mina to talk to Rav. Rav opens his mouth as if to say something a few times, and I can feel his eyes on me as I rinse the dishes before scooping up the baby and taking him up for a bath. Once Mina and the baby are in bed, I head outside to the garden while he is still reading to Mina, stepping outside into the cool May evening and finding myself breathing more easily as soon as my feet touch the lawn. Fussing with the border, I prune back the dead leaves and stems, even though it is the wrong time of year to do it, and march backwards and forwards with the watering can in an attempt to revive the wilted plants. I don’t look at the pond, where the columbine grows, and I avert my gaze from the oleander tree as I splash loosely around it with the water. As the soil beneath the tree turns dark and damp, I think of the bones and feathers buried beneath it, the idea of them a solid and heavy weight, the malevolence I felt from them only slightly dulled by the dirt. I should have burnt them, I think, although the idea of breathing in the smoke they would give off makes my stomach roll.