I never told Amber I was pregnant. After she admitted that Mitch had never loved her, except as a friend, I didn’t see the point. It would have been rubbing salt in the wound. I’ve often wondered in the intervening years what might have happened if I hadn’t saved her life and she had survived regardless. Perhaps her vitriol and jealousy might have lingered on, endeavouring to keep me in the frame for murder. What ifs and maybes no longer mattered. Arthur was incarcerated in a mental institution and Oliver had been released.

‘Mum, do you believe in ghosts?’ Mitch had run back, grasping my hand again with a worried look scrunching up his perfect face.

‘I believe that people we love go up to heaven and live on. They’re all around us,’ I said, hugging him close.

‘Is my daddy around us?’ Anxious eyes stared at me; your eyes, so dark and full of life.

‘Yes. He’s everywhere. You’re a little piece of Daddy who stayed behind just for me.’

We strolled away from the castle and headed back along the beach, dipping our toes in and out of the water.

Oliver had called round and finally apologised. I had been packing up to leave London and head back up north when one morning there was a gentle knock at the door.

‘Rebecca, may I come in?’ I was no longer afraid of him. He seemed to have shrunk both physically and mentally.

‘Tea or coffee?’ I asked. We sat down and he told me how his life had fallen apart.

‘My wife left me after I was released. She’d already packed her bags and waited until I got home before telling me. It had all been too much for her.’

If he was expecting sympathy he would have a long wait.

He continued. ‘I told her about us.’

I got up as he spoke, lifted the empty mugs and returned them to the sink.

‘I told her how I’d been eaten up with jealousy when you went off with Mitch. I explained how you had been my first real love.’ He dropped his head in his hands and for a moment I thought he was crying. His shrunken hulk seemed to shake as I watched. What seemed like an eternity, perhaps no more than five minutes, elapsed before he finally said what I’d been waiting to hear for the past decade.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all he said. It was enough. He knew what he’d done and was paying the price. He would pay for the rest of his life.

Mitch had taken all his clothes off, throwing them in the sand about fifty yards up the beach from where I was sitting.