She had always loved her home, but an urge to escape tugged at her with determined fingers: to a beach with a vast sky that swallowed her up or an isolated French farmhouse, hidden amongst lavender bushes and olive groves. The journalists outside were closing in on her, a rat in a trap.

But Catherine was a survivor. She could handle this, as she had handled her eight-year incarceration at Mayfields secure children’s home, with its tall metal fences and the ladder of locked doors between her room and the outside world.

Her bed had been fixed to the floor so it couldn’t be smashed apart. She’d had to sleep on a blue plastic gym mat, because it was easier than a mattress to remove if it was used to barricade a doorway. To prevent flooding as a gesture of protest, her shower’s water flow was controlled. After every meal, the cutlery and plates were counted – and then locked away – so the residents could not use them as weapons on themselves or each other.

She had even survived the constant monitoring by unit staff, never allowed to have so much as a private conversation or switch on a light or climb the stairs alone, suffocated by life on the inside.

The summers she spent at Mayfields were the most difficult. She had longed to roam outside, to escape the simmering tensions that threatened to boil over in the heat. But Catherine was smart. She kept her head down, earning money by collecting merits for good behaviour or extra electricity for the television in her room.

She blinked away the memories of a time she had condemned to the dumping ground of the past, but a simple truth remained: even now, technically free, she was imprisoned by the choices she had made.

Edward was standing at their bedroom window, staring down at the journalists and photographers, camera crews, news vans and the lone police car, his handsome face serious, half in shadow.

‘Shut the curtains,’ she said, sounding sharper than she meant to. He ignored her.

‘There’s so many of them,’ he said, with a kind of grudging awe. ‘You’re famous.’

Not famous.

Infamous.

Catherine dragged a suitcase from under their bed and began to throw in underwear and jumpers and jeans. It had become apparent that the small packed rucksack she had kept in her wardrobe in case she needed to make a swift escape, with one day’s worth of clothes and a few essentials, would not be enough.

‘They can’t publish my name,’ she said. ‘It’s protected. By a court injunction.’ She breathed deeply, as if she’d been starved of air for too long. ‘Honor, too.’

Edward caught the fold of skin under his chin between his thumb and finger. ‘But they know who you are now.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll have to change your identity again—’

‘Probably.’

‘—and move away, start again.’