I’m not going to even try to sleep with Lena’s words whizzing around my head. No one ever understood the friendship I had with Greg. Isn’t that why I kept it secret? Because people would see the girl I was then, fifteen going on sixteen, and Greg nearly forty, and they’d see it as wrong. What I always saw, though, before I messed things up so spectacularly, was a lonely man who’d lost his daughter, whose wife had left him. At first, wasn’t that what I was to him—a surrogate daughter? My fault, everything that went wrong, not his. I don’t believe, never did believe all that crap Lena was spouting about him. It wasn’t my experience, so how can I go to the police and implicate him? Without knowing who is buried in the woods?

I trudge downstairs, frowning when I see the front door is ajar. I hear a cough and take a step outside. Jack steps out of a patch of darkness, cigarette glowing in his hand.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Obeying the no-smoking-inside rule,” he says, flicking the cigarette away.

“In the middle of the night?”

“One for the road before I tuck myself up in beddy-byes.”

I stand on the step, wishing I hadn’t come out. I have nothing to say to Jack and I can’t hover here awkwardly forever. I’m about to turn away and go back inside when he speaks again. “I was out here, all maudlin in the dark, thinking about families.”

I fold my arms and take a step closer to him. “Understandable, with Julia…”

“None of us have the conventional family setup, do we? You and Leo, Max and Lena with their parents jetting off without a look back. And me and Sean.” He stops and laughs.

I raise my eyebrows. “I guess out of all of us, you’re the only one with anything approaching a conventional family—wife and child, house in the suburbs.”

His laughter stops. “Yeah, that’s not going so great.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” He sounds amused. “You probably think it serves me right, don’t you, Tess?”

“No. No, of course not.” I’m glad it’s too dark for him to see my face properly.

“Did you know our respective dads had a fight once?”

“What are you talking about?”

Jack shrugs. “Not long before the wedding.”

I shake my head. “No, he never…”

“I followed Dad over here and pulled the two of them apart. It was such a shit time—Mum living with you, Dad was a mess, Nic had been murdered.”

My heart skips a beat, catches up in a sick gallop. I remember Bella telling me how uncaring Jack had been over Nicole’s murder. And Sean has revealed that Jack was around when the murder happened. But in the moonlight, he doesn’t look uncaring, he looks haunted.