About half an hour in, he picked up the remote and pressed pause. ‘You’re still fretting.’

‘I’m not! Honestly, I meant it when I said I’ve faced far worse. Part of writing articles means people not only decide they hate you, they get pathetic amounts of pleasure from repeatedly telling you that.’

‘Eleanor, you can’t sit still. It’s like sharing a sofa with a termite nest.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry, tell me what’s up.’

Daniel’s face softened in the glow of the table lamp. His arm twitched a few inches towards me, and my breath caught as I wondered whether he wanted to reach for my hand. I longed to lean my head against him, bury my face in his jumper and tell him everything, but instead I leant back, summoned up a self-deprecating smile and rolled my eyes.

‘Sorry. I think it was “pipsqueak” that got to me.’

His eyes roamed my face, searching for the truth. I wished with a desperate ache that he could read my mind, even as I feared it.

Nothing could happen between us. It was a futile, miserable hope that the zaps of electricity were something he felt, too, when I was hiding so much. I could no longer pretend that my past life was irrelevant. But he’d made it clear how he felt about Nora Sharp, and imagining him feeling those things about me was more than I could bear.

To never know Daniel as more than a friend, I could live with. To lose that friendship would break me.

I took the remote out of his hand, ignoring the flutter of attraction when my fingers skimmed his palm. Pressing play, I wiggled further back into the sofa and picked up my wine. ‘I’m fine.’

It was a long night, spent twisting myself up in my duvet. After checking my old phone for the zillionth time, sure that this time I really had heard a notification ping through, I turned it off. I still heard the imaginary pings, but at least the remaining dregs of my rational self could now ignore them.

That wasn’t the only thing keeping my brain whirring. My restless thoughts constantly roamed back to Daniel. To his eyes, his smile, every time he’d ever spoken to me or looked at me or happened to walk down the hallway at the same time…

To where he lay, wearing scruffy lounge pants and a rumpled T-shirt, because even in March the farmhouse was still freezing at night, only a few metres away across the landing.

Most of all, I wondered whether he was thinking about me.

Nights like this, I ached for Charlie.

Hauling myself out of bed while it was still dark, I washed down a fortifying bowl of porridge with extra-strong coffee, stuck my hair in a ponytail, donned my scruffiest clothes, collected the necessary tools and climbed up to the top floor.

Since clearing Charlie’s old room, it had sat there empty of everything but the bare furniture. Some of it would stay – I planned to repurpose an old chest of drawers and a bookcase to put in the side room for Hope, along with her changing table from the study, and the rest would go in the barn in case we wanted to use it somewhere else later on.