Nate had found her a few days later, sitting in a darkened living room. ‘Talk to me,’ he said as he sat down beside her. He had been tentatively stepping around her since the fire, as if he didn’t know whether he trusted her or not. It wasn’t until four days later, when Mia walked into the police station and gave her confession, that Laura saw a glimmer of relief on his face.

Laura had longed for Nate to believe her when she told him there was no way she had anything to do it. She’d told him she’d walked out the building at seven-thirty p.m. and had not looked back. That much was true. She could never be capable of burning down an office; she was angry, but never that mad.

But she also understood that she couldn’t expect her husband to believe her, when she hadn’t told the whole truth from the start; when she’d later had to admit that she had been there – on the quay – and had known about the fire before the call the following morning, but had been too scared to admit it, when there was a chance she could get away with pretending she hadn’t known.

Nate had been furious with her for lying, but eventually accepted her fear.

She was afraid. She’d been afraid for her part, her silence, and even now the events of the night still ate away at her. How she’d found out that Mia had been at Morris & Wood for Janie all along; and that taking her job had never been anything to do with Laura. Laura had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time – her job had come up, and Mia was right there waiting for it.

Laura had been in the wrong place on Monday night too. How she wished she’d never been at the quay; that she hadn’t learned the truth about the fire, and hadn’t been willing to keep quiet.

The day Nate asked her to talk to him, he was no longer worried that she’d done it, but he was still worried about her.

‘What do you want me to say?’ she had replied.

‘I want you to say whatever it is that’s going on in your head. I want you to stop shutting me out,’ he had told her.

‘I’m not doing that.’ Laura had shaken her head, folding her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. Gently Nate had prised her hands apart and taken hold of them in his own. ‘I have been talking to you,’ she said. ‘You know how I feel.’

‘I know you think the answer is to close yourself off from the job you once loved.’