I threw Birdie a look as I passed, wanting her to see that I knew she hadn’t taken enough care passing the cat to my sister. She looked back at me, her eyes so small I could barely make out their colour.

I was a strange boy. I can see that now. I’ve since met boys like me: slow to smile, intense, guarded and watchful. I suspect that Birdie had probably been a very strange little girl. Maybe she recognised herself in me. But I could tell she hated me, even then. It was obvious. And it was very much mutual.

I passed Justin as I crossed the hallway. He was holding a battered box of Black Magic and looking lost. ‘Your parents that way?’ he asked, pointing in the general direction of the kitchen.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In the kitchen. Through that arch.’

‘Merci beaucoup,’ he said, and although I was only ten I was old enough to know that he was being pretentious.

We were sent to bed shortly after that, my sister with a plaster on the inside of her arm, me with the beginnings of an upset stomach. I was one of those children: my emotions made themselves felt in my gut.

I could hear them shuffling about upstairs later that night. I put a pillow over my head and went back to sleep.

The Black Magic sat unopened on the kitchen table the next morning, when I came down extra early. I was tempted to unpeel the cellophane and open them. A small act of rebellion that would have made me feel better in the short term but way, way worse in the long. I felt a movement behind me and saw the cat squeezing through the door behind me. I thought about the scratch on my sister’s arm and remembered Birdie’s impatient tut: ‘It was an accident, she wasn’t holding her properly, Suki would never scratch on purpose.’

A bubble of hot red anger passed right through me at the memory and I hissed loudly at the cat and chased it out of the room.

It was almost a relief to go to school that day, to feel normal for a few hours. I’d just started my last term of primary school. I would turn eleven the following month, one of the youngest boys in my year, and then I would be moved on to a bigger school, closer to home, with no knickerbockers. I was very fixated on it at this point. I had very much outgrown the knickerbocker school and all the children I’d grown up with. I could tell I was different. Completely different. There was no one like me there and I had fantasies about going to the big school and finding myself surrounded by people like me. Everything would be better at the big school. I just had ten weeks to get through, then a long boring summer, and then it would all begin.

I had no idea, none whatsoever, how different the landscape of my life would look by the end of that summer and how all the things I’d been waiting for would soon feel like distant dreams.

10

Libby sits at her kitchen table. Her back door is open on to her courtyard, which is overcast in the late afternoon sun, but still too humid to sit in. She has a Diet Coke poured into a tumbler full of ice to hand and is bare-footed, her sandals cast aside moments after walking into her flat. She flips open the lid of her rose-gold laptop and brings up her Chrome browser. She is almost surprised to see that the last thing she’d browsed, four days ago, before the letter had arrived and upturned everything, was local classes in salsa dancing. She can barely imagine what she’d been thinking. Something to do with meeting men, she supposes.

She opens up a new tab and slowly, nervously, types in the words Martina and Henry Lamb.

She immediately finds a link to an article in the Guardian from 2015. She clicks it. The article is called: ‘The Mysterious Case of Serenity Lamb and the Rabbit’s Foot’.

Serenity Lamb, she thinks, that was me, that is me. I am Serenity Lamb. I am also Libby Jones. Libby Jones sells kitchens in St Albans and wants to go salsa dancing. Serenity Lamb lies in a painted cot in a wood-panelled room in Chelsea with a rabbit’s foot tucked inside her blanket.

She finds it hard to locate the overlap, the point at which one becomes the other. When her adoptive mother first held her in her arms, she imagines. But she wasn’t sentient then. She wasn’t aware of the transition from Serenity to Libby, the silent twisting and untwisting of the filaments of her identity.

She takes a sip of her Coke and starts to read.

11

The house in Antibes is the colour of dead roses: a dusty, muted red, with shutters painted bright blue. It is the house where Lucy once lived, a lifetime ago, when she was married to Marco’s father. Ten years after their divorce she can still barely bring herself to use his name. The feel of it on her tongue, on her lips, makes her feel nauseous. But here she stands, outside his house, and his name is Michael. Michael Rimmer.

There is a red Maserati parked on the driveway, leased no doubt as Michael is many things but as rich as he thinks he should be is not one of them. She sees Marco’s gaze hover intently on the car. She can see the naked desire written on his features, his held breath, his awe.

‘It’s not his,’ she mutters, ‘he’s just renting it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just do, all right?’

She squeezes Stella’s hand reassuringly. Stella has never met Marco’s father before, but she knows full well how Lucy feels about him. They approach the door and Lucy presses the brass bell. A maid comes to the door, wearing white overalls and latex gloves. She smiles. ‘Bonjour, madame,’ she says.

‘Is Mr Rimmer at home?’ asks Lucy, using her best and clearest English accent.

‘Oui,’ says the maid. ‘Yes. He is in the garden. Wait one minute.’ She pulls a small black Nokia from the pocket of her overalls, pulls off one of her latex gloves and dials a number. She glances up at her. ‘Who shall I say is here?’

‘Lucy,’ she says. ‘And Marco.’

‘Sir, Mr Rimmer, there is a lady here called Lucy. And a boy called Marco.’ She nods. ‘OK. Yes. OK. OK.’ She hangs up and slips the phone back into her pocket. ‘Mr Rimmer says to bring you to him. Come.’

Lucy follows the tiny woman through the hallway. She averts her gaze as she walks, away from the spot at the foot of the stone staircase where she’d ended up with a broken arm and a fractured rib when Michael pushed her when she was four months pregnant with Marco. She averts it from the spot on the wall in the corridor where Michael banged her head repeatedly because he’d had a bad day at work – or so he explained an hour later when he was trying to stop her from leaving because he loved her so much, because he couldn’t live without her. Oh, the irony. Because here he is, married to someone else and utterly and entirely alive.

Lucy’s hands shake as they near the back entrance, the one she knows so well, the vast wooden double doors that swing open into the tropical splendour of the garden, where hummingbird moths sip from horn-shaped flowers and banana trees grow in shady corners, where a small waterfall trickles through a flowery rockery and a sparkling rectangle of azure-blue water sits in the southernmost point, basking in the afternoon sun. And there he is. There is Michael Rimmer. Sitting at a table by the pool, a wireless headpiece in one ear, a laptop open in front of him and two phones, a small bottle of beer belying the hectic business-guy act he’s clearly portraying.

‘Lucy!’ he says, beaming, getting to his feet, sucking in his tanned stomach, trying to cover up the fact that at forty-eight he no longer has the gym-sculpted physique of the thirty-eight-year-old man she’d escaped from ten years earlier. He pulls the earpiece from his ear and heads towards her. ‘Lucy!’ he says again, with added warmth, his arms outstretched.

Lucy recoils.

‘Michael,’ she responds circumspectly, moving away from him.

He takes his outstretched arms to Marco instead and gives him a bear hug. ‘So you told her then?’

Marco nods.

Michael gives him a mock-withering look.

‘And who is this?’ says Michael, turning his attention to Stella who is clinging to Lucy’s leg.

‘This is Stella,’ says Lucy. ‘My daughter.’

‘Wow,’ says Michael. ‘What a beautiful little girl. Lovely to meet you, Stella.’ He offers his hand for her to shake and Lucy resists the temptation to pull Stella from its path.

‘And this is?’ He peers down at the dog.

‘This is Fitzgerald. Or Fitz for short.’

‘For F. Scott?’