How did men do it? At home, at work. They just slipped past. Outside lane, foot down. Greater confidence, less concern for collateral damage, the assumption that they deserved more, the willingness to fight for it. Only last month Steven Lacey had been offered a chair at UCL. Shahid Nawaz was being courted by Berkeley. Twenty-eight sodding years old. Equality wasn’t enough. You’d already learned a long way back to think of yourself as second class.

She’d been wrong about the light. It couldn’t be a star because there were no other stars visible. It had now risen past the Plimsoll line of the TV aerial on the neighbouring chimney. Too static to be a helicopter, too silent. She pictured an alien ship as big as St Brides Bay, completely invisible till they turned off the cloaking device and it filled the sky.

People of Earth…

Those months that she and Lucy… It was a kind of Eden. The floorboards they had painted with a tin of eggshell blue from a skip on the corner, those cheap curtains blowing gently in and out with the summer air. There was a third drawer, wasn’t there, which was not quite forgetting but not quite remembering either. The Rosa Luxemburg poster, ice-cream vans, Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh thumping from the squat on the far side of the Tube line.

It was the planet Venus. How had she not noticed? The Evening Star. So strange that they were really up there, not just pictures in books. Mars, Saturn, Mercury. Actual worlds.

She slid her iPhone out of her jacket pocket.

Why had she never tracked Lucy down? Watching those video clips of Deb Oliver playing bit parts in Casualty and Coronation Street. Cassie’s triplet blog. The schadenfreude of Mr Carpenter’s public fall from grace. But Lucy…? What was she scared of finding out?

She turned the phone on and dimmed the screen. Two hundred and nine unanswered emails plus a text from Joe insisting that she come to the hotel for a proper breakfast in the morning. She clicked onto the home screen, that calming photo of the Sound of Sleat she had taken seven years ago from the top of Ben Aslak.

Pandora’s Box. She tried to remember the story. Was it the good things which escaped and were lost? Or was it the evil things which got out and caused havoc? A woman refused to do what she was told and was punished. That was the real message, of course.

She popped Safari up. Amazing to think that you could draw down a billion facts from the sky using a machine which sat in the palm of your hand. She remembered hiding under a blanket in that godforsaken caravan in Cromer listening to Radio Luxembourg with Karen. ‘Telegram Sam’ and ‘Leader of the Pack’. The crackle between the stations. Who heard it these days? Some lonely domes hunkering out on the moors.

She typed Lucy Millen into Google Images. Too young… too young… a glamour model in black lingerie… a cross-country runner… a brown oil painting of a dowdy Lucy Millen who died in 1885… a drunk and dishevelled arrest photo from Knoxville, Tennessee… the runner again… a teenage Lucy Millen doing a duck face for her Twitter profile… the runner… the runner…