It meant she’d have to go on acting all polite with Mr Mayhood, even when he nit-picked over tiny details in her drawings. Offer no complaints about the rota when it came to chores about the place. Keep on working hard (but not too hard) to get the root cellar built, then complete her set of elevations for the greenhouse (in her own good time) and finish all the odds and ends of carpentry that she’d been putting off for weeks (but not in such a rush that it would draw attention). Stick to hassling her brother if she caught him staring with those dewy eyes at Mrs Mayhood from across the room and telling him that he was subtle as a dog outside a butcher’s window. Be as late as usual to meet her supervising officer when he paid his visits, answering his list of questions in her standard tone, making the same faces, giving him the usual smart-alec comments. Everything she’d done before, she had to keep on doing. Or else she’d end up back in Aylesbury – even worse, a women’s prison with a crowd of revokes, hard of heart, and not a hope in hell of going out on licence for another eighteen months. And Charlie – this would snuff out any last breath of forgiveness he had left to give, and that’s what scared her most. But it was starting to exhaust her, thinking over every movement that she made, sieving out her words for hitches every time she had to speak. Her stomach was a shank knot, getting tighter by the hour.

This morning was the worst she’d felt in years. The shudders had set in. Her teeth were chattering so much she had to bite down on her sleeve to calm them. Since she couldn’t sleep, she hadn’t bothered getting into bed, and she’d been standing at her window fully dressed for ages, waiting for the sky to lose its pink. She didn’t want the day to start, but there was nothing she could do to ward it off, and when the rumble of her brother pissing in the toilet carried down the hallway, she accepted that the time had come.

She went downstairs for breakfast, making small talk with the Mayhoods as they passed the toast rack back and forth, eating with her eyes down on the cartoons in the newspaper. Later, Charlie took a seat and pestered her about her drawings for the greenhouse; she satisfied him by insisting she would work on them all night to get them ready, at which point Mr Mayhood said, ‘That’s fine by me. Don’t rush it.’ Florence ate her usual three rounds of toast and jam, drank her pot of tea and cleared their plates. And the first time anybody mentioned the old man was after they’d wiped off the dishes, in the lull when they were sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the whistle of the kettle.

‘Honestly, I’m still not sure if we should carry on the greenhouse plans with Mr Hollis out of reach like this,’ Florence called in from the pantry. ‘It was his idea, and God knows he had very strong opinions on the way it should be built.’ She stepped out with a Mason jar of flour and her book of recipes. ‘Perhaps we ought to leave it till he’s back.’