Dominic was a typical thirteen-year-old boy in most ways. Spotty, awkward, addicted to his PlayStation. He was also somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Brilliant at maths and chess, but fragile and cripplingly shy, barely able to cope with the social side of school. I am not exactly sure whether he was ever given a special educational needs statement, even if such things existed in those days. I was too wrapped up in my own problems, not privy to my aunt and uncle’s conversations. All I knew was that Dominic made me feel awkward and uncomfortable. He would ask me questions that I didn’t want to answer, questions about the accident, about what it sounded like when we hit the lorry, whether I knew the velocity of the car when it collided with the truck, whether I remembered our Nissan rolling over and how loudly Tilly had screamed. Thinking back, I guess he was trying to make mathematical sense of it, find a neat way in which he could understand it. Being asked these questions though, mere months after it happened, repeatedly, made me want to punch him. I avoided him as much as I could. I didn’t want to hit anyone. I didn’t like or understand these feelings of rage and the urge to commit violence. I had never been like this.

I had been assigned a bereavement counsellor after the accident, a man with nostrils like the entrance of a great forest, who wanted me to talk to him about my feelings. I tried, at first. I didn’t tell him about the sadness and fear and anger that would swoop down out of nowhere, when I was waiting to cross the road, or that were provoked by a misplaced word, like Dominic’s questions. I pretended I was fine, tried to convince him. I lied to him, told him things I thought he’d like to hear, based on a TV documentary I’d watched.

The only person I could be honest with during this whole period was Tilly, on the rare occasions I was left alone with her, flat on her back in the hospital, the rest of the family gone to the cafeteria, nurses coming by every so often to turn Tilly to prevent bed sores. Tilly and I would talk about Mum and Dad, but also the future: Tilly was going to get better and I would look after her. She was going to be a paralympian athlete. She would hold my hand and cry and I would whisper that I was sorry, that it should have been me.

Between my made-up life at college, the lies I told my counsellor and pretending to be fine in my new home, my visits with Tilly were what I clung to, little moments of reality that allowed me to hold on to my true self.