A wave of nausea passed through her. ‘She told me that I shouldn’t see you. That you didn’t seem that interested in me.’

‘She was jealous. She didn’t like that I liked you. But she was with Max and, I don’t know, I guess I wanted you both. Chloe, I’m so sorry. This was a long time ago, I was very young, and very fucking stupid. And then that night, during that awful fucking game, she told me that we were over. She was wearing Max’s ring. She said all this stuff, she baited me …’

Chloe looked up, trying to focus on Max. ‘You knew?’

Max nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘You knew the whole time?’

‘I knew she was sleeping with someone else. I suspected it was Rav. And then the party happened. He came to me that night, told me what had happened.’

‘And you covered for him?’

‘You always forget, you didn’t know her for very long. You had no idea what she was like. She could get into your head. She could make you absolutely fucking crazy. I’m not saying she deserved what she got. He shouldn’t have done it. He knows he shouldn’t have done it. But would you really have wanted Rav to go down for that? How would it have looked? Angry brown kid beats up a beautiful white girl with millionaire parents? They’d have thrown away the key.’

Chloe drank from her wine glass again. ‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t try and act like this is normal. Like what he did was okay.’

‘It wasn’t okay,’ said Rav gently. ‘I know that. I’ve regretted it every day since and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.’

‘It’s your fault she died!’ Chloe shouted, for a moment forgetting to keep her voice down for the neighbours, forgetting to pretend that she was calm, that she was in control of the situation. Zadie would have known that she and Rav had stayed together all those years. That they got married. Had she thought that Chloe knew? That she didn’t care?

‘That’s not true,’ said Max, who did at least have the good grace to drop the smirk he’d been wearing earlier. ‘Everything I said to you – about her being ill, unstable – it was all still true.’

‘She wasn’t like that.’

‘Don’t you care that she was sleeping with him? She knew about you two, and she didn’t stop,’ Max went on.

‘Stop it.’ Chloe shook her head. ‘Stop it.’

‘She listened to you talking about him. She watched you check your phone to see whether he had sent you a message. And then she went back to his room and fucked him. You don’t care about that at all? That doesn’t matter to you?’