The police had found Bryn. They’d brought him in for questioning as he left his local pub opposite the duck pond in the leafy commuter town. It was the same day they’d let Owen go home. His name was not Bryn, of course. It was Jonathan. They found more date-rape drugs in his flat. Reams of incel literature. Violent pornography. Drafts of his blog posts on his laptop. They took his prints and matched them to those on the pot of pills he’d given Owen. He’s on their watch list now, as a terrorist threat. That made Owen happy.

Liz smiles at him as she passes him and says, ‘Bye, Owen. It’s been great getting to know you. I really wish you all the best, all the very, very best. I hope you can put everything behind you. You’re a good man and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you.’ She kisses him quickly on the cheek, squeezes the top of his arm.

He watches her dash across the street to someone waiting for her in a parked car. She waves at him from the window and he waves back.

The training course has been a revelation. Not just in terms of what it’s taught him about how to behave in the workplace, but what it’s taught him about how to behave, full stop; how women’s minds work, what makes them feel safe, what makes them feel unsafe, what’s banter, what’s creepy.

Earlier in the week a woman had come in to talk to them about the sexual harassment she’d experienced from a former employer, how he had seemed so nice at first, but after a while she’d realised that every single second of every single encounter, whatever they were doing, whatever they were talking about, he was seeing her as a woman, not a human being. That had really hit Owen dead centre. He’d been doing that all his life, he realised. He had never, ever had a conversation, an interlude, an encounter with a woman without the primary thought in his head being that she was a woman. Not once, not ever.

He’d put up his hand and he’d asked her how to stop doing it.

The woman said, ‘You can’t simply stop doing it; if you consciously try to stop doing it, you’ll still be putting the woman’s gender at the top of your encounter. The only way’, she’d said, ‘to stop doing it is to acknowledge to yourself when it’s happening, to own your reaction. To work around it. Think about something else. Say to yourself, This is a human being wearing a red jacket. Or, This is a human being with a northern accent. Or, This is a human being with a nice smile. Or, This is a human being with a problem who needs my help. Own your reaction. Work round it.’ She’d smiled at him encouragingly and he’d put her advice into action immediately. He turned his sensation of talking to a young, reasonably attractive woman into the sensation of talking to a human being with brown shoes on. It had worked. It broke the spell. He’d smiled at her and he’d said, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

And so now, pending confirmation from the course directors that he has passed the assessment criteria, Owen will have his job back at the college. He has written to Monique and Maisy, explained, without expecting pity or even understanding, that he suffers from fragmentary blackouts when he’s drunk even a small amount of alcohol, that his recollection of the night in question is very different to their recollection, but that he wholeheartedly believes and accepts their version of events. That he is abject with regret and sadness that he made them feel uncomfortable and that he chose to disbelieve them when they had the courage to tell the truth. It was a wordy missive, but from the heart and worth doing properly, he’d thought, so that no one could ever accuse him of just doing it for the sake of getting his job back. He wants to be able to face them in the classroom next week and for there to be a bond between them, not a divide.

Owen no longer lives with Tessie. He’s renting a studio flat in West Hampstead, just for now. He’ll make proper plans soon. But in the short term it was important that he escape from her and her poisoned view of him. She tried to pretend she was sad that he was going. But she wasn’t. Owen has a sofa now, not an armchair, a double bed, not a single, and he keeps his home as warm as he wants it to be.

He heads towards the Tube to take the Piccadilly line to Covent Garden. Just before he descends the escalator, he gets out his phone, finds Deanna’s number and sends her a text. Just getting on the Tube, it says. Be there in twenty minutes.

He waits a beat to see if she’ll reply. Then there it is: See you in twenty minutes, birthday boy!

He switches off his phone, smiles and heads into the underground, towards dinner, with his girlfriend, on his birthday.

60

Cate puts the key in the shiny new lock on the front door of their house in Kilburn. She looks behind her at the children. Georgia gives her a little shove and says, ‘Go on. Get on with it!’

She turns the key and pushes the door and there it is. Their house. It’s a lovely April morning, halfway through the Easter holidays. The removal men are on their way from the flat in Hampstead and finally, 456 days after the builders first arrived, Cate’s house is hers again.

The sun plays off immaculate pastel-grey walls and leaves pools of golden light on the newly sanded and waxed floorboards. There’s not a fleck of dust, dirty mark or piece of clutter anywhere. It’s a beautiful blank canvas, just right for new beginnings.

Georgia gasps. ‘It looks so awesome!’ she says, before running up the stairs to check out her bedroom.

Cate goes to the kitchen and runs her hands over the pale wood of the work surfaces, the dove-grey tongue-and-groove cabinet doors, the gleaming back ceramic hob. She can barely remember what her kitchen looked like before; too much has happened in between.

Cate has finally said goodbye to Roan. After Josh had come to her that morning back in February and told her about his father’s affair, Cate had numbly thought she might still be able to make it work. She’d done it before, she figured, she could do it again, keep the marriage artificially alive for a few more years, until the children were gone. But once the drama of Saffyre’s disappearance had settled and life had returned to its normal proportions, she’d woken up very early one morning, looked down at her sleeping husband’s face, always so peaceful in sleep, his skin still unlined and fresh, a vaguely smug smile on his face and she’d thought, Everything about you is an illusion. You have conned me for thirty years and I can never trust you again.

He’d cried when she told him she wanted him to leave. Cried and said he couldn’t live without her. Of course he had. That was Roan’s MO. But she’d enjoyed the feeling of the power tipping back her way again after so long being made to feel the unhinged wife. He’s taken a sabbatical from work to get over the trauma of finally being made to feel the consequences of his actions. He’s back in Rye, in the spare bedroom of his parents’ cottage. He phones a lot and talks about how much he can change. But Cate doesn’t want him to change. She just wants him to leave her alone to get on with the rest of her life.

And what is the rest of Cate’s life going to be? Last week she put down a deposit on a treatment room at a clinic in Neasden and once Georgia’s finished her GCSEs she’s going to start practising physiotherapy again, full-time. The children are mainly self-sufficient these days. Josh has blossomed since becoming friends with Saffyre and Cate no longer feels the innate need to be at home for him all the time. She will remortgage the house to pay Roan his share and will need an income for the repayments. She also needs an existence beyond her kitchen table, the stimulation of interaction with people she’s not related to; doing the grocery shop can no longer be the sole focus of her days.

So many things had dropped into place in the aftermath of Josh’s interview with the police. Everything had been oddly connected.

It turned out that Tilly had in fact been attacked outside their house and that the attacker was Harrison John, the same boy that Josh and Saffyre had been hunting down. Tilly had recognised Harrison halfway through the assault; he’d been at her school for a couple of years, before being expelled for disruptive behaviour and moved to a special unit. Everyone at the school knew his name; he was infamous for his bad behaviour. Harrison had seen the recognition in her eyes and realised that he knew Tilly too, that he was friends with someone who lived on the same floor in her block. Apparently when he saw that he’d been recognised, he’d grabbed her wrists, hard, and whispered into her ear, ‘I know where you live, OK, remember that. I know where you live,’ before quoting her address at her and disappearing into the night.