He lapses back into silence for a few more minutes. It’s good Max is driving—the road slips and slides in front of me, stretching and contracting. I’m hoping I might get some proper sleep tonight, away from the village, that this new insomnia has to do with being back home. I haven’t slept for more than a couple of hours for nearly a week now. My eyelids get heavy and I feel myself drifting off.

“Hey, listen,” he says, pulling me awake again. “Enough brooding. When we get there, why don’t we have dinner and catch up? With everything that’s been going on, it seems like we’ve hardly spoken.”

Ten years ago, I would have done anything to hear him ask me out for dinner, caught up in the agonies of first love. But ten years ago, I had a sister and something approaching a normal life. Max is all tied up in the horror of what had happened and I don’t know how to unpack it all. I don’t know whether he sees any of that in my face but he smiles and shakes his head.

“Sorry—forget I said anything. Bad timing, I know. Our moment got missed, I think.”

Moment? Did we ever have a moment?

“It’s not that. I’ve arranged to have a drink with my friend, that’s all.”

I haven’t thought much about Max. I haven’t allowed myself to think about him. But, equally, now that he’s back, I don’t want him to disappear. I don’t want to stop thinking about him again.

“But I’d love to have dinner,” I say. “Why don’t you come with me to meet Sophie? We can eat afterward and if it gets too late, you can stay at my place—I have a sofa bed.”

“So Sophie, your friend, she’s another teacher?”

“That’s right. I met her on my first day in the job and we hit it off right away. She’s fab—you’ll love her.”

He shakes his head. “You know, I never pictured you as a teacher. When Julia told me…actually, that’s not entirely true. I could imagine you as a primary school teacher. I remember how great you were with Ellie.”

“Yeah, well, she was a great little girl. Easy to love.”

“Yeah. But secondary-school kids? Classes full of Seans and Jacks and Nicoles? Why put yourself through it?”

“It was…oh, I don’t know. After Bella died and everything that happened, I stopped gardening, I didn’t want to do it anymore and I was…lost, I guess. I fixated on teaching because that’s what Bella said she was going to do.”

“Bella? Teaching? Come on! I thought she was going to art college to do photography?”