The faces around the dining room table tonight were smiling and engaging for a change. No teenage angst or sullenness. No barbed comments or loaded questions. Lydia seemed more cheerful than she had been in a while, chatting happily to Diana, her voice giddy and babbling. She had upped her make-up game again and was sporting a full face of colour. She looked like she had borrowed one of Mills’ cropped t-shirts too and was baring a lily white, concave stomach above the waistband of skinny jeans. Her phone was next to her on the table and her eyes kept straying over to it like a nervous tic.

Diana and Lydia were laughing, talking about things they had seen on TikTok. Matt was desperately trying to join in the conversation, laughing and adding little quips, but his voice was more forced, like he was trying to muscle his way in. Diana had eaten with them every night for a week now, but Helen seemed to be the only one irked by this. And maybe Mills, who rarely said two words to Diana. Meanwhile, Hugh looked delighted every time he saw her, his face flushing, his sweaty palms patting down his wayward hair.

She had figured it was a harmless middle age crush until she had seen the photo in his office. She found herself watching Hugh closely as he removed his glasses and wiped them vigorously on the handkerchief he kept in his pocket. He was certainly acting as pompous as usual, if not even more so, in a pathetic bid to impress their guest. Maybe someone had left the photo for him. Maybe he hadn’t seen it yet, tucked as it was between the papers on his desk. Either way, none of it made sense. Why involve Hugh unless it was meant to harm her by dragging him into what happened all those years ago?

She could feel Mills watching her as she chewed on the skin around her fingers instead of her dinner, so she forced herself to stop. She had waded through a pile of food earlier when she was alone at the bookshop – crisps, biscuits, a dozen doughnuts – all of it in a bid to stop her mind from lurching from one ridiculous theory to the next. Now her stomach felt stretched and bloated, her throat scratched and raw from the aftermath. Her binges and purges were escalating again and she could feel herself teetering on the edge of what was controllable. She had been here before.