Becky is to blame, surely she is to blame. All she can think about is that night in the playground, those moments before Adam came for her, and how she had thumped her legs, how she had stopped short of thumping her stomach as blame ran so hot through her blood she thought her soul would melt. Her fault for ending up that way.

Now she cries, and she tears at her scalp and hair, wanting to tear out chunks, to disfigure herself, make herself bald and ugly and naked. Claws at her legs and arms like a cat defending its life from a predator. What about Amber’s family? What of the sickness and blame sitting inside Amber’s mother, that she raised her daughter all wrong – in a way that made her so vulnerable to damage?

Amber should not be the person to die. This is not her fault.

Amber is Medea is Becky is Medea: but the goal was revenge, not death.

Becky cannot bear to be with herself any more. Clambers out of bed and pulls every miniature out of the fridge. She lines them up on the bed and unscrews the tiny top off one, then tips the stinging stuff down her throat, swallowing and gagging. She looks at the others but doesn’t touch another, she already feels so sick.

She lies on her back on soft maroon carpet and thinks of Maisie and Adam in Dungeness: how these beloved people will be stepping between the vast makeshift shacks and daffodil-yellow wooden houses, over the pebbles – perhaps discussing whether Becky is all right, if she’s really all right. She can see the lighthouse and the waves and the cut-out shapes of cacti in her mind’s eye, all set against the grey backwash of a sky that’s lost its sun, clouds assembling, tumbleweeds spinning. And in the far distance the nuclear power plant dominating, all white and peppermint-green matrices gated up in thin metal. A black burnt-out house frame against the horizon. Pylons holding out their arms, offering nothing: these will surely remind Adam of the place they were both raised, a trigger to tell Maisie how hard it was for her mother then, how dreadful it was to feel so alone with something so new and yet so precious.

Perhaps Adam will think of last night, and regret it.

They have only been gone an hour, promising to come back for her as soon as she starts to feel right. She has declined their offer of going straight back to London. There will be paparazzi on her doorstep again, won’t there? Maisie will want to know what Becky thinks about the news but she is not ready for that.

Colours mix and the staid lines of the room blur around her. She needs to get to the bathroom.