Patrick:No. She was having this conversation with Mia in the hallway, which sounded weird, from the little I could garner, and then – she disappeared. I didn’t see her again, and by the time Harry returned I’d already called my own taxi. I didn’t want to hang around much longer, even though a lot of the staff were happy to carry on drinking his champagne. You see, this is what I mean when I say the whole night was a disaster. Janie and Harry are friends of mine, but … You know all morning, ever since I heard about the fire, all I keep wondering is whether it had something to do with that night.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

One week before the fire

Janie stood in the doorway to Ella’s bedroom, pausing for a moment before she woke her. Ella was eleven, still her baby, and yet she filled the length of her single bed, which remained stuffed with teddies and cushions. When had her daughter grown up to the point where Janie could get so little out of her any more? And yet all she had to do was look at her little girl’s room and she felt the tug on her heart strings that they were caught in this trap between child and teenager, and Ella hadn’t even started the dreaded secondary-school years. How the hell was she going to get through them?

Janie sighed as she crept over to her daughter’s bed and gently shook her awake. Ella snatched the duvet and wound it round herself tighter, and eventually Janie said softly that she was going downstairs to make breakfast, and could Ella please start getting up. Some days all she wanted was to yell at her daughter that she didn’t want to get out of bed, either. But she also knew that was never a good way to start the day. And then there were moments like today when she wondered how easy her days would be, if the only thing she had to worry about was her girls.

Janie’s stomach was unsettled, her mind flittering between past events and those more recent, all of which she’d kept pushing to the back of her mind while knowing it wasn’t going to take much for any of them to start unravelling her if she gave them space to breathe.

She knew it might help to talk to someone and part of her wondered if she’d open up to her friends when she met them for coffee later that morning. The bigger part knew she probably wouldn’t.

After ordering an Americano, Janie joined them at the window table. She lifted the cup to her lips and blew, peering over the rim as they waited for Lucy to relay her latest story about her youngest.