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The doorbell interrupts my thoughts, and as much as I can’t wait to see my favorite person, I rue another day having slipped past me without my achieving what I set out to do. Though I’m relieved to see from the grandfather clock in the hall that at least one of the hours I thought I’d lost has been credited back—it’s only two o’clock. So it can’t be Hannah back home from school just yet.

“Hello?” I say with a big smile, ever mindful of Brad’s observation soon after we met: “You Brits are a hard-to-read bunch,” he’d said, laughing. “I’d never know whether you were greeting a lover or a convicted murderer. The look on your face is exactly the same.”

I’d been mildly offended, not knowing what he meant, but took notice of the warm welcome I received in the coffee shop the next morning and how the person in the street would smile when I stepped in their lane, wishing me a good day, instead of scowling and tutting. I hadn’t even realized I was so British, but from that day on, I vowed to be more American.

“Nicole Forbes?” asks the woman on the porch, with a look of exaggerated expectation.

“Yes, how can I help you?” I say, still beaming, blissfully unaware of how misplaced my expression is about to become.

“Hi,” she says, thrusting her hand forward awkwardly. “My name’s Zoe Mortimer and I wondered if you could spare me a few minutes.”

It’s then that I hear it: the clipped syllables of a British accent. My defenses are immediately on high alert, barricading me into the fortress I’ve worked so hard to fight my way out of. But I reason that this woman—girl, really—whose name means nothing to me, might be about to offer her support to the conservation effort.

“What can I do for you?” I ask, my smile no longer quite so genuine.

“Could I come in?” she asks, looking around furtively, and I wonder if she’s from the city council, here on unofficial business. The thought that next week’s hearing date for the petition might have been canceled immediately gets my hackles up.

“Of course,” I say through gritted teeth as I beckon her into the hall.

Watching her step across the threshold is akin to watching Bambi step onto ice, and I suddenly realize that whatever news she’s come here to deliver, it isn’t good. I steel myself for being told that the hearing isn’t going ahead, that a decision has already been made, that—

“I’m writing a book,” she says. “And I wondered if I might be able to ask you a few questions.”

A rush of relief runs through me. “Of course—I’m always happy to do anything that might help the seals’ plight.”

Her expression changes, her earlier trepidation replaced by a forced confidence, as if she’s having to psych herself up. She flicks her dirty-blond hair out of her eyes and pulls her shoulders back.

“I wonder if you could tell me about your relationship with Ben Edwards,” she says, abruptly.

The heat that I’d thought I’d learned to control at the mention of his name creeps up around my ears, sending warning signals to my brain. The woman’s face becomes hazy, and although I can see her mouth moving, I can no longer hear what she’s saying over the thunderous roar that’s reverberating around my head.

I move toward the front door in a daze, desperately trying to claw back to one minute earlier, when I thought the worst thing this stranger could say was that the seals would remain unprotected.

“I… I…” I flounder.

“I understand you were there that day”—she looks away, as if the memory pains her more than me —“when it happened?”

The weight of her words makes it sound as if she’s underwater—or maybe it’s me, drowning in an ocean of secrets.

“I-I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I bluster, my tongue feeling like cotton wool as it attempts to wrap itself around the lie. “You need to leave.”

“I just wondered what it must have been like to witness the demise of the biggest band of the eighties in such tragic circumstances. Conspiracy theories abound even today, twenty-five years later, but I just wanted to know, from someone who was there ringside, what really happened.”

“You’ve got the wrong person,” I say, more forthright now.

“But you are Nicole Forbes?” she asks again. “Formerly Alderton?” She puts her bag, which I imagine being weighed down with the secrets of my past, on the hall floor.

The passive-aggressive action leaves me in no doubt that this woman has no intention of going anywhere. But she can’t stay here—I won’t let her. I won’t allow the home that I’ve spent the past twenty years transforming into a safe haven for my husband and my child be violated by the nightmare I’ve been running from for even longer.

“You need to leave,” I seethe, with my hand on the open door.

“I understand your reticence,” she says, cocking her head to one side in a hollow attempt to impart sympathy. “You and Ben were close, and I get that you don’t want to relive it all over again, but…”

I lean in close, the tip of my nose just a few inches away from hers. “Whatever you think you know, you’re wrong. There’s no story here, no conspiracy theory; it was what it was, and justice was served.” I stand tall and take a deep breath. “Now get out of my house.”

She smirks, as if to let me know that conceding defeat now doesn’t mean she won’t try again. “Well, as long as you haven’t spent the past twenty-five years picturing his face and wondering what might have been.”

I don’t wait for her to cross the threshold before forcing the door shut and sending the bolts across, as if it will somehow stop those very thoughts from infiltrating my beleaguered brain. I wait to hear her footsteps on the path, forgetting to breathe as I imagine every flowering rose on either side of it wilting as her dark shadow deprives them of sunlight.

I suck in a breath as I collapse onto the bottom stair in the hall, my eyes desperately scanning my surroundings, looking for something familiar—to prove that nothing has changed. Yet everything looks different. I don’t recognize the coats on the stand, and I can’t reconcile who they might belong to. Even the photo of me, Brad, and Hannah that sits proudly on the sideboard doesn’t jolt my paralyzed nerve endings into action, our faces suddenly seeming alien to me.

I close my eyes, willing myself to still the pounding of my heart—to stop it from beating through the wall of my chest. But the darkness only makes the light shine even brighter around Ben, who’s smiling down at me in my mind’s eye. I try to ignore the image, if only to prove to that woman that she’s wrong, that I don’t spend every waking moment thinking about him, and every sleeping one dreaming about the two of us together in another lifetime.

“ Fuck! ” I cry out with frustration as I clench my fists and slam them into the unforgiving wooden banister.

I thought I’d left that world far behind, if not from an emotional standpoint then certainly from a geographical one. I’ve ensconced myself so completely in this place I call home, buried my old life within its foundations so deeply that I thought it could never be found. So how come a stranger has managed to uncover what I’ve spent years hiding?

As I pull myself away from the image of Ben and the pain and sorrow he always evokes, I’m suddenly blindsided by the thought of Brad. The guilt jolts me out of my reverie, the here and now perpetually in conflict with the past I’ve forced myself to forget. I ask myself for the millionth time what my honest and loyal husband would make of my betrayal if he were ever to find out who I really am. Would he be able to overlook my tumultuous former life in favor of the peaceful harmony we’ve since created together? Or would he be unable to see past the deceit, no longer able to trust the wife he thought he knew?

Sometimes, even I wonder whether she’s a figment of his imagination, invented to stop the rot of grief and the bitter regret of lost opportunities that had befallen her. But on those days, when I question myself more than anyone else would dare to, I can’t help but feel proud of how well that imposter feigns normality. Of how she’s able to reconcile losing the love of her life in such horrific circumstances, and then subsequently losing everything else she ever cared about as a result.

But it seems you only need to scratch the surface to find that the old Nicole Alderton is still very much there. Zoe’s appearance has unleashed her from the cage she’s spent all these years thrashing around in. And I honestly don’t know how I’ll get her back in.