She vomits into the toilet bowl, straining her insides like she wants them to come unstitched from her, lungs and heart streaming out blood before their tubes and flesh splash into the water beneath.

There is one thought she cannot bury.

If you are the woman who saw me, you can call the police direct if you don’t want to speak to David. Please, just don’t say nothing.

The eyes are the windows to the soul, she tells herself, as she looks in the mirror and washes her mouth out.

Her thoughts swim back and back, heart thrashing in her chest, a sick rush back in time, but she digs her fingernails into the present – don’t take me there, please don’t take me there – by running the cold tap again and sticking her mouth under it. Rinsing and spitting. She pushes the bathroom door closed, there isn’t a lock. Notices that perhaps she is sore down there and pushes her underwear down to around her knees, sits heavily on the toilet, cradling her head on her hand, arm resting on her thigh, and sees the crotch of her pants – lace, a bold magenta – stiff now. Feels around her pubic hair and yes, it is there too. Like glue.

And she is being sick again, even before she knows it, all across the marble floor, losing the strength she needs to stop what is now certainly happening – God, no, she remembers nothing after her eyes rolled back, lying back into the coats with Scott and he said I’m so fucked Becky, I’m so fucked, are you? And she was too gone to say anything at all, she was just thudding with drugs like she was underwater, pummelled, pinned under by the waves. Waking up, nothing, nobody who can tell her who—

Chapter 23

Hampstead, London

14 September 2003, the morning after the party

She is lying down, is all she knows – lying down in a bed, but she doesn’t know where, at first. Arms by her side, she pulls something up between her fingers, like pulling up grass, but she is not in a field of living green stuff, she is somewhere un-alive where the air smells stale with smoke and sweat. She looks down. She is holding the coverlet she had seen earlier, so pretty and pink and swirled like the silken inside of a conch shell. She has fallen asleep at the party.

She doesn’t know how she got there. In that moment, all she thinks she’s lost is time.