Turning off the engine, Janie stretched her gaze further to the bushes that provided a boundary between her long driveway and the road beyond. Someone had been watching her house and now she wondered if they’d recognised her car. Eventually she climbed out and waited for the girls to do the same, all the time glancing around them. Anyone could be lingering in a number of places.

The girls were now hovering by the front door, and eventually Janie clicked the car shut and the alarm in the house off and, with one last glance behind her, let them all inside.

There had never been any danger in the past. No threats. There was absolutely no reason to think someone was watching her again, because why would they be?

Probably, she thought, as she’d flicked on the lights and had a near miss with the girls’ school bags that had been dropped in the middle of the hallway, it was all in her head. It was just because she had been thinking too much lately. Her Facebook search for Miles had planted pictures in her mind, and she had even dreamed of him the night before.

Now Janie’s phone was ringing in her bag, and yet it took Anna to point it out to her before she realised. ‘Oh,’ she murmured. She hadn’t even heard it. Dipping into her bag, she pulled her mobile out and saw Sophie’s name on the screen.

‘I better take this,’ she said to her friends as she picked up the call. ‘Hey, Soph, everything all right?’ she asked on instinct, but immediately she could tell it wasn’t, as the sound of sobbing filled the line. Janie scrambled out of her seat and went outside the café, pressing her phone to her ear as she said, ‘Sophie, what the hell is wrong?’

She was immediately taken back to the last call like this that she had received from her best friend. Five years ago she’d had to leave the house one evening and look for Sophie, whom she’d found soaking wet, sheltering from the rain in a shop doorway, her bright blue wrap tightly wrapped around her. That night she hadn’t managed to get her friend to tell her what had happened, but Janie had known. When, twenty-fours later, Sophie eventually opened up, Janie had expected the story, but still she had been shocked by the entirety of it. What it meant.

‘Sophie, please, will you tell me what’s happened?’ Janie begged now.

‘Mark’s dumped me,’ she wailed. ‘And he’s taken five hundred pounds out of my bloody purse and …’ Her words gave way to more sobs.

‘Mark?’ The artist boyfriend. Again no shock, only this time Janie felt relief ride through her. Mark was manageable – they could get through this one.