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FORTY-FIVE

What do you think of him?” Ash asks Arlo that evening after Nick has left.

“Seems good,” he replies with a shrug.

“But don’t you think—I mean all the stuff with him being a life coach, changing his name, all of that, it’s all just a bit…?”

Arlo shrugs again. “He explained all of that, though.”

And it was true. Nick had explained everything, calmly and elegantly, with no hint of anger or defensiveness, his blue eyes glossy with tears. Ash had become almost mesmerized by his words as he talked, as if he was reading to her from a thrilling novel about a man called Nick Radcliffe.

He’d changed his name, he told them, because he’d been stalked by a crazy ex.

The woman called Laura that Sarah May said he’d been living with in Cambridge was his girlfriend, not his wife, the two children were hers, not his.

He hadn’t mentioned this part of his life to Nina, he explained, because he was always having to cover his tracks to protect himself and his identity from the threat of the stalker ex.

He was sorry, he said, for his lack of transparency, but he’d had no choice.

Nina had clasped his hand in hers and told him that she understood.

“And what about the lighter?” Ash asks now.

“What about the lighter?” Arlo replies.

“Jane Trevally said he never had a Zippo.”

“Right, and Jane Trevally is totally the first person you’d trust to remember anything.”

“Actually, yes, when it comes to Dad. And you haven’t met her, OK. She’s cool. She’s not like we thought she was. I trust her.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think a lighter that Dad might or might not have had when he was, what, like twenty-three, twenty-four, is enough to base a whole opinion of the guy on.”

Ash sighs. She hasn’t even mentioned the pacifier clip and the poo bag to Arlo because Nick already has stories for those. She rolls her head. She’s tired.

“I’m going to bed,” she says, sighing. “Night, little brother.”

She pats his head, and he pretends to duck and dive, and then laughs and pats her head back and says, “Night, big sis. Love ya.”

“Love you too.”

On her way up to bed, she stops at the picture window in the living room that overlooks the channel, and she stares out into the night sky, at the moon reflecting bluey-white off the murky surface of the sea and the straggle of stars and the glow of the Christmas lights on the high street down below.

She feels an ache in her gut, thinking of the twenty-five eves of Christmas that have come before this one and the slightly different person she was on each and every one of them, but particularly the version of herself who stood here two Christmases ago in the throes of madness, still hiding it from her family.

She remembers her father coming to her right here that Christmas, his hands on her shoulders, the smell of wine on his breath, and saying to her, “None of us is perfect, you know, angel, not even me.” He’d laughed drily and squeezed her shoulders.

“Don’t be scared to talk to us. We all make mistakes. Believe me. We really do.”

Six months later, the police had arrived at the flat she was sharing with two other girls near Greenwich.

She couldn’t remember much after that, other than the way her flatmates had looked at her, the brittle air of shock and slight disgust. Her father, of course, when she spoke to him on the phone afterward, had said simply, “Come home, angel. Just come home.”

And now here she is again, obsessing over another middle-aged man, maybe about to blow up her life again.

But she can’t help it. She has to protect her mother, at any cost. She sighs and turns and is about to head up to bed when her eye is caught by the gifts from Nick Radcliffe under the “Christmas yucca.” She should wait, she knows, but she doesn’t want to wait.

What, she wonders, has Nick Radcliffe bought her for Christmas?

She picks up the gift and takes it to her room, where she sits cross-legged on her bed and unwraps it.

And there it is. Another pink box. But unlike the box that the lighter came in, this one has a small rose embossed on it.

She runs her finger across it and it takes her back suddenly and surprisingly to another moment, and inside her head she is running her finger across the same embossed rose and she cannot remember where or when, but she knows she has seen this rose before, and she has seen this precise shade of pink before, not just on the box in which the Zippo arrived and not just in Marcelline’s office at work, but somewhere else entirely.

She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to bring it to mind, but she just can’t.

Then she opens her eyes and pulls the lid off the box.

Inside there is a row of three small soaps, each embedded with flower petals, all tucked into pale pink tissue paper.

She lifts them to her nose and sniffs. They smell incredible.

Ash loves soap. She read somewhere that soap is better for your skin than all the man-made unguents and potions that are designed to clean skin, and ever since then she’s made a beeline for interesting soaps wherever she goes.

And these, she knows, are top quality, handmade and probably very expensive.

She slips the lid back on the box and stares again at the rose.

But still, she cannot remember where she saw it.