“Do you want to come out to lunch with us tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Hugo Livingstone’s coming. We thought it would be good if you could join us. What with Milena, Hugo’s in a bad way. It would do him good to meet a friend.”

“That would be great,” I said, hearing my voice tremble. “Look forward to it.”

All the way home I felt as though I was stained with something. I had turned over a stone and found horrible slimy things, but in the end what did it amount to? What had it really told me? Yet still I felt contaminated by it. When I got home I had a long shower, trying to wash off all the Gwen-ness, all the deceptions and entanglements. I stood there until the tank began to empty and the water turned lukewarm. Afterward I pulled on a torn pair of jeans and a scraggly old sweater. I went outside into the garden and stood for a while, feeling the cold darkness on my face.

I thought of calling Gwen and asking her to come over, but I knew she was with Daniel tonight. Mary? She was looking after Robin, and I couldn’t abide the thought of talking to her while she held his little body to her chest and cooed into his downy hair. Fergus? He was with Jemma, waiting for the labor pains to begin. Joe? I could call Joe and he’d be over like a shot, with a bottle of whisky and his gruff brand of tenderness, calling me “sweetheart” and making me cry. I almost picked up the phone, but then I had a vision of myself as they must see me: poor Ellie, sucking misery into a room, needy and sad and not moving on, battening on to the lives of others.

So I went back into the kitchen, and first of all I made a phone call to Party Animals, knowing Frances would not be there so all I had to do was leave a message saying I wasn’t coming back and wishing her luck with the future. That done, I opened the small drawer in the table, where I pushed miscellaneous leaflets, flyers, bills, and took out the list that had been given to me all those weeks ago by the policewoman, the leaflet with helpful phone numbers for victims, for the stricken, the harmed, the bereaved, the helpless.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Judy Cummings was a short, stocky woman in early middle age. She had abundant coarse dark-brown hair with occasional strands of gray, thick brows over bright brown eyes, and was wrapped in a long, bulky cardigan. Her handshake was firm and brief. I had been dreading the kind of handshake that a grief counselor might give, which goes on for too long and tries to turn into a condolence, a fake intimacy that would have had me running for the door. But she was almost businesslike. “Take a seat, Ellie,” she said.