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So she carries on, shaking off those thoughts of the past that haunt her. It’s not only the past that scares her; she fears the present too, some days, and not even staying at home helps. Sometimes she feels even more suffocated there than she does out in the world.

She keeps her circle small because she finds it hard to trust people. Even those who she does let in don’t know the whole story, or even half of it. He is the only one who understands. Only he has helped her, reminded her that other people are not to be trusted with their story.

She doesn’t need reminding that not everyone is what they seem. She of all people knows that only too well.

Chapter 12

2016
Waking the morning after my Norfolk trip, I feel relieved to be at home in something resembling normality, although I can’t imagine how things will ever be normal again. I know Polly thinks I should do more for myself, reach out to the friends I’ve neglected over the past couple of years, but I can’t cope with adding anything new to my life. I am only just managing as it is.

Henry always goes to Sam overnight on a Wednesday, so in the morning I begin gathering his things – underwear, spare uniform, Manky – and chucking them into his little rucksack. He’s had Manky since he was a baby. At some point, when it began to get very ragged around the edges, Sam and I started calling it Manky Blanky and the name stuck. Things go back and forth from Sam’s house to mine so I’m never quite sure what he’s got there that he might need, but there is only one Manky and he is irreplaceable. As I shove a spare school jumper in, I feel something hard and sharp in the front pocket of the bag. I unzip it and peer in. When I see what it is, I sink down on Henry’s bed, staring at the photo of me and him on the beach, both of us grinning and squinting against the sun.

‘Henry, can you come here a minute?’ I call.

He comes running in from the kitchen, licking jam from his fingers, but stops dead when he sees what I’m holding.

‘Why have you got this in your bag, H?’

‘I like to look at it,’ he says under his breath.

‘When?’

He seems to grow smaller. ‘When I’m at Daddy’s. Sometimes I miss you.’

Tears ache in my throat and sting the backs of my eyes. ‘Come here.’

He rushes to me and leaps onto my lap, wrapping himself around me, his solid little body melting into mine.

‘I miss you too,’ I say, straining to speak lightly. ‘But you have fun with Daddy, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he says into my neck, ‘but sometimes I want to look at you.’

‘That’s fine, H.’ My voice cracks slightly and I swallow. ‘You didn’t need to take the photo, you could have just told me. Tell you what, why don’t we make up a big frame with lots of pictures of you and me, and you can put it up in your bedroom at Daddy’s?’

He gives me a final hug and goes back to his toast. I sit for a moment on his bed, looking at the photo of the two of us, arms around each other, bathed in sunlight. It feels like a million years ago. As I put the photo back in its place on the shelf, I can’t help feeling relieved. I was being paranoid after all; no one has been in my flat.

I’ve got to stop neglecting my clients or I’m going to start losing them, so with Henry at Sam’s I am able to finally get somewhere with Rosemary Wright-Collins’s latest project. Having Rosemary as a client is so important: without her, my business would be floundering. Sam suggested once that I was misguided to work so much for her, that having most of my eggs in one basket was a mistake. He wanted me to turn down work from her, thought I was spreading myself too thinly trying to fulfil all her requirements and keep other clients happy. He was glad my business was doing well, I am sure he was. But it’s not lost on me that he left me for someone much younger, much further down the career ladder. I know Polly thinks so.

On Friday, I pick Henry up from after-school club, and when we get home instead of plonking him in front of the telly, I play with him. We make a huge and complex track with his wooden train set and then he instigates a convoluted story where the trains have to save one of the cows from his farm set who is stuck on the line. Every time I attempt to bring the story to a close with some kind of resolution, he creates a new and apparently insurmountable obstacle that extends the game further. I watch as he pushes the little engines around the track, his face deadly serious, totally absorbed in the world we have created. It’s cosy in the sitting room, but a chill creeps over me. This is why no one must ever know what really happened to Maria. I cannot allow anything to jeopardise Henry’s innocent faith in the world as a benign place, where no one would allow a cow to be run over by a train, or take a mother from her child.

Once Henry is in bed, I sit at my kitchen table with a glass of red wine, the lamp in the corner casting a calming glow. The smell of the ready meal warming in the oven is beginning to waft through the room: onions, garlic, herbs. I scroll through my emails – the problem with working from home is that in a sense I’m always at work, unable to ever fully switch off. I open another window and go to Facebook. I’ve been checking it constantly both on my laptop and my phone, and each time there’s no message the faint hope that it’s over grows stronger. That it was someone playing a sick joke, a stupid prank – upsetting and disturbing, but no more than that. One of the school mums is spewing the details of her latest break-up on her page, but she has some of her ex’s mates as Facebook friends and they are weighing in, disputing her version of events, calling her names. I am drawn in, as I used to be years ago when I watched the soaps on TV, but with the added fascination that this is real life, or at least something like it. I’m amazed by the extent to which some people live out their lives on here. This woman doesn’t even say hello to me on the rare occasions I see her at the school gate, yet I know all the gory intimacies of her love life.