Six years since the relationship had ended for good, Strike had come to see that the unfixable problem between them was that he and Charlotte could never agree what reality was. She disputed everything: times, dates and events, who’d said what, how rows started, whether they were together or had broken up when he’d had other relationships. He still didn’t know whether the miscarriage she claimed she’d had shortly before they parted forever had been real: she’d never shown him proof of pregnancy, and the shifting dates might have suggested either that she wasn’t sure who the father was, or that
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