Mum, as always, has been amazing. The caravan park has been sold and she’s put in an offer on a large bungalow with sea views where she’ll live with Flora. They are due to complete any day now. Adam and I have bought a smallholding not far away, just big enough for a few horses. Adam has taken a job at the shooting range, and starts there next month. We’ve had to work on our marriage. He feels guilty that he never believed me about the Wilsons having something to do with Flora’s disappearance, and it’s taken me a while to forgive him for that. But life is too short: the last few months have taught me that much. And I love Adam. I want it to work between us.

Mum and the police officer, Gary Ruthgow, have grown closer, going on dates and enjoying each other’s company. I always suspected she had a thing for him. But it’s wonderful to see her truly happy at last.

Watching how Mum tends Flora so patiently and with such love has made me want to be a better mum. A better person. Everything I did – have done – was for love.

I wish I could say the same for the other members of my family.

Two weeks ago I had a phone call from Deborah Price. She’d been in Flora’s year at school and, once, Jess and I caught her getting off with Uncle Leo in the sand dunes when she was barely fifteen. I was surprised to hear from her after all these years. She wasn’t friends with Flora and had never really spoken to me, even when we caught Uncle Leo’s hand in her bikini top.

‘I know it’s a bit weird to be calling you,’ she’d said, her voice husky, while I wondered who had given her my number, ‘when we don’t really know each other.’ A baby cried in the background. I’d heard through the grapevine that she had five children and I occasionally spotted her around Tilby, looking stressed, her hair scraped back into a greasy bun, as she pushed a double buggy and pulled on a dog’s lead, a fag hanging from her mouth. ‘How is Flora?’

‘She’s getting better,’ I’d replied curtly, wondering if she was only calling to get the gossip on my sister.

‘I read about what happened in the newspapers.’ The press had had a field day with the story and it had run for weeks. Everybody from the past got dredged up: Norman pleading his innocence that he wasn’t involved in any kidnapping; Marianne Walker-Smith’s brutish-looking stepfather, who cried on TV over her death; an old girlfriend of Clive Wilson’s, who said he liked her to dress up as a schoolgirl in the bedroom.