Outside, the day had grown gloomy and cold, and as Nikki called them a cab, Heather found that the small cache of good spirits she had built up over the afternoon were leaking away into the shadows. She wasn’t going home now, to her untidy yet cozy room in a house shared with other untidy people; she would be going back to her mother’s empty house, no doubt to a long night of trawling over bad memories and unanswered questions. Something must have shown on her face, because once she slipped her phone back in her pocket, Nikki touched her arm softly.

“Hey. Cab’s going to be a few minutes. Are you all right?”

Heather shrugged. The fizzy drinks were a sour slick in her stomach, and she felt too weary to pretend.

“The suicide note was really weird. Did I tell you that?”

Nikki shook her head, her brown eyes somber.

“I mean, like you said, she was in a bad place, and there’s no real reason to expect a suicide note to make sense, I suppose.” Heather tried to smile, but it twisted into something sickly on her lips, so she stopped. Instead, she opened her satchel and slipped a piece of paper from out of her notebook. It was pale lilac, with a picture of a wren at the top next to a banner reading “notes to you”. For reasons she didn’t want to look too closely at, she’d kept it with her since the police handed it over along with her mother’s belongings. Her mother’s cramped handwriting hunched in the middle of the page. She passed it to Nikki, who frowned and smoothed it over carefully with her fingers.

“To you both. I know this will be a shock, and I’m sorry that you will have to deal with all this mess, but I can’t live with it anymore—not knowing what I know, and the decisions I have had to make. They say this is the coward’s way—well people who say that don’t know what I’ve lived with, this awful shadow I’ve lived under forever. All those monsters in the wood never really went away, not for me. And maybe that’s what I deserve. I truly am sorry for everything to come, for what it’s worth. Despite what you might believe, I love you both, and I always have.”

Nikki didn’t say anything, instead pursing her lips and looking down the high street. After a moment, she touched a finger to the corner of her eye and sniffed.

“Oh, Hev, that’s awful. Your poor mum.”

“Don’t you see though?” Heather took the note back, folding it away into her bag. She was glad to have it out of sight. “To you both. I love you both. What does that mean? There’s only me. She had no other family left. And what is she talking about, these decisions?”

Nikki shook her head slowly. “Okay, it is weird. But maybe she meant you and your dad? If she was very unwell, she might have forgotten that he’d died already, somehow. Or … or, she could be talking to whoever found her body.”