Tomorrow evening, I’ll be at home again, with Sophie and Ethan. And Adam. If I can just get home safely, I’ll never cheat on him again—never. I won’t flirt, won’t look on Intimate Links, won’t do anything I have to lie to anybody about.

The elevator doors open at the fourth floor. I pull my phone out of my bag as I walk along the corridor to room 419, suddenly feeling an urgent need to remove any trace of myself from the Intimate Links website. Deleting my “I Want a Secret” ad won’t undo anything that’s happened, but symbolically it will help me, make me feel I’ve disconnected from something horrible.

Will my advert still be there, buried beneath all the more recent ones? Maybe they delete them automatically after a year or so.

In my room—also red and gray—I throw my knapsack on the bed, trying not to think about the bed itself. I’ve brought nothing with me apart from my phone, the blindfold, spare underwear and a toothbrush and toothpaste.

I’m not going to have sex with him. He won’t insist on it. He could easily make it a condition of his telling me the truth about Damon Blundy’s murder, but he won’t. I don’t care if he wants me not to utter a word, like last time. He’ll soon find out that I intend to speak as much as I want to.

He cares about me, about what I want.

Then why has he deceived you twice, in such a damaging way?

All right: I’ve no idea if he cares or not, or what caring even means to a man like King Edward. Do I trust him? No. But I want something from him: information.

If I have to have sex with him in order to find out who killed Damon Blundy, I’ll do it. I’ve had sex I didn’t want plenty of times—never against my will, always by choice, to make the other person happy. This time, it would be for my own satisfaction, because I need to understand how exactly my life ended up entangled in a murder investigation.

On my phone’s screen, I bring up the Intimate Links site and go to “Personals.” In the search box, I type, “Secret.” There’s no way it’ll still be there after all these years.

Several results appear. None of them’s my advert. They’re all too recent. I click on the most recent one, from July 4, last Thursday. It’s headed, “Looking for a Woman with a Secret.” I start to read it, at first because I find it puzzling. The writer claims to want neither a long-term relationship nor casual sex.