She presses refresh on her phone, absent-mindedly.

She looks again. A stupid number sits there. A number that makes no sense whatsoever. It has too many zeros, too many everythings. She turns her phone to face Dido. ‘Oh. My. God.’

Didi covers her face with her hands and gasps. Then she turns to face the front of the café. ‘Waiter,’ she says. ‘Two bottles of your finest Dom Pérignon. And thirteen lobsters. And make it snappy.’

There is no waiter of course and the people at the table next to them throw them a strange look.

‘My friend’, says Dido, ‘has just won the lottery.’

‘Oh,’ says the woman. ‘Lucky you!’

‘You know,’ says Dido, turning back to her. ‘You really don’t have to go back to work after this. It’s your birthday. And you’ve just been given eleventy squillion pounds. You could, if you wanted, take the rest of the day off.’

Libby smiles, screws up her paper napkin and drops it on the plastic tray. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No way. I’m no quitter. And besides, I’m pretty sure I left some paperwork slightly askew.’

Dido smiles at her. ‘Come on then,’ she said, ‘three and a half more hours of normality. Let’s get it over with, shall we?’

67

Lucy has the flat to herself for another hour. She uses it to have a bath, to paint her fingernails, to dry her hair with a dryer and make it sit neatly over her shoulders, to moisturise, to put on make-up. She still doesn’t take these things for granted. It has been a year since Henry found her in the house in Cheyne Walk, since he brought Serenity to them, since they were all reunited. For a year Lucy has lived with Henry in his immaculate flat in Marylebone, where she has slept on a double bed under soft cotton sheets and had nothing more to do with her days than walk the dog and prepare delicious meals. She and Clemency meet up once a month and drink champagne and talk about their children and music and Henry’s idiosyncrasies and anything, in fact, other than what happened to them both when they were young. They will never be as close as they once were, but they are still the best of friends.

Marco is thirteen now and enrolled at a trendy private school in Regent’s Park, which Henry has been paying for and where ‘everyone vapes and takes ket’ apparently. He has lost his French accent completely and, as he says, ‘I now identify as a Londoner.’

Stella is six and in year one of a nice primary school in Marylebone where she has two best friends who are both called Freya.

Yesterday Lucy took the tube to Chelsea and stood outside the house. The hoarding has been taken down and the for-sale sign outside has been swapped for a sold sign. Soon the house will be alive with the sound of drills and hammers as it is taken apart and put back together again to suit the tastes and needs of another family. Soon, someone else will be calling it home and they will never know, never suspect for even a moment the truth about what happened within those walls all those years ago, how four children were imprisoned and broken and then released into the world, damaged, incomplete, lost and warped. It’s hard for Lucy to remember the girl she was then, hard for her to accept an incarnation of herself that was so desperate for attention that she would sleep with both a father and a son. She looks at Stella sometimes, her tiny perfect girl, and tries to imagine her at thirteen years old giving herself like that just to feel loved. It makes her feel unimaginable pain.

Her phone pings and she experiences as she always does, and probably always will, a shiver of unease. Michael’s murder has not been solved but has been widely accepted to have been the result of some unpaid debts to his associates in the criminal underworld. She saw one mention of herself in a French paper shortly after the murder hit the headlines:

Rimmer, who has been married twice, is believed to have a child with his first wife, a Briton known only by the name of ‘Lucy’. According to Rimmer’s housekeeper, he and his former wife recently had a brief reunion, but she is not considered to be a suspect in the case.

But she will never be truly relaxed about the possibility of being tracked down by some fresh-faced young detective, newly qualified and desperate to prove themselves. She will never, she suspects, be truly relaxed ever again.

But it’s not a message from a rookie detective, it’s a message from Libby: a screenshot of a page from her bank statement accompanied by the word Kerching!

There it is, thinks Lucy, and a shiver of relief runs through her. The end of this phase of her life. The beginning of the next. Now she can buy a place of her own. At last. A place for her and her children and her dog. A forever place that no one will be able to take away from her. And then, she thinks, then she will be able to discover exactly what it is that she should be doing with her life. She would like, she thinks, to study the violin. She would like to be a professional musician. And now there are no barriers in her way.

The first half of Lucy’s life was tainted and dark, one struggle after another. The second half will be golden.

She replies to Libby’s message.

Champagne all round! See you later sweetheart. I cannot wait to celebrate with you. Everything.

Libby answers: I can’t wait to see you either. Love you.

Love you too, she finishes, then adds a long row of kisses and switches off her phone.

Her girl is glorious: a gentle, caring soul, a blend of Stella and Marco in many ways but also so very much her father’s child in the way that she walks her own path and makes her own rules, that she is so entirely and utterly herself. And she is growing and changing so much, leaving behind some of the tics and compulsions that held her back, letting life show her her journey rather than imposing a journey on to her life. She has been worth every bad moment between leaving her in her cot and finding her again. She is an angel.

Lucy picks up her phone again and she scrolls through her contacts until she gets to the Gs. She composes a message:

Darling Giuseppe. This is your Lucy. I am missing you so much. I just wanted you to know that I am happy and healthy and well and so are the children and so is Fitz. I won’t be coming back to France. I have a wonderful new life now and want to put down roots. But I will think of you always and forever be so grateful to you for being there for me when my life was out of control. I’d be lost without you. My love, always, Lucy.

68

In the restaurant in Marylebone that evening Libby’s family awaits her.

Lucy, Marco, Stella and Henry.

Marco greets her with an awkwardly dramatic half-hug, his head knocking against her collarbone. ‘Happy birthday, Libby,’ he says.

Stella hugs her gently and says, ‘Happy birthday, Libby. I love you.’

These two children, her brother and sister, have been the greatest gifts of all.

They are wonderful children and Libby puts that down entirely to the woman who raised them. She and Lucy have become very close, very quickly. The small age gap means that often Lucy feels a like great new friend, rather than the woman who gave birth to her.

Lucy gets to her feet. She circles Libby’s neck with her arms and kisses her loudly in the vicinity of her ear. ‘Happy birthday,’ she says. ‘Proper happy birthday. This time twenty-six years ago. God. I thought I was going to split in half.’

‘Yes,’ agrees Henry. ‘She was mooing like a cow. For hours. We had our hands over our ears.’ Then he gives her one of his cautious embraces.

Libby still can’t work Henry out. Sometimes she thinks about Clemency saying that she thought he had a streak of pure evil, and a shiver runs across her flesh. She thinks of what he did, the execution of four people, the mummification of a young woman’s body, the mutilation of a cat. But killing had never been his intention and Libby still believes that if the four children had turned themselves in to the local police that night and explained what had happened, how they’d been so mistreated, imprisoned, that it had been a terrible accident, that they would have been believed and rehabilitated. But that’s not how it had been and they had all made fugitives of themselves and taken their lives off on unimaginable tangents.