She worries that when she gives birth to the baby she’ll be so full of hatred that she’ll grab it from the doctors and swing it by the ankle so that its head breaks on the delivery-room wall.

Where do these ideas come from? She has been polluted. Changed. She is a ruined person. Scott isn’t. Scott still mooches along with his friends.

A few days later, Mary asks again if Becky was all right at the party all those weeks ago. She keeps asking because Becky just hasn’t been her normal self since then. Becky shrugs and then Mary says she wasn’t going to say anything but she heard that Scott said they got off with each other and were maybe going to do more but then they both got so off their tits on these strong pills he’d got that they could barely sit up straight let alone do anything else.

‘I think Scott really liked you,’ Mary tells Becky. ‘At the time.’

Becky sees Scott just one more time before she gives birth.

She finds him sitting alone out on the school playing fields. She has gone to find him, and she has. She knows she only has days to go, and then she might never come back here.

He looks up at her as she approaches.

She looks him in the eye. ‘I just want to tell you that I know about you, OK? I know,’ she says.

‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ he says.

She wants to stay. She had promised herself she’d have the whole thing out, but she’d expected him to deny it. He looks pathetic. Frightened. And she can’t do it anyway. She turns and walks away from him, her foetus – his foetus – awake and kicking hard.

‘Becky!’ he calls after her, but no, she won’t come back. A sob bubbles out of her throat as she wobbles away. She still wants to kill herself.

She almost hates Adam for what he has done, binding her to being alive.

She doesn’t go back to school again, except to sit her exams. She is in and out.

The day she brings Maisie home from the hospital, she opens her bottom drawer and takes out the pink pants she has wrapped in a plastic bag, and throws them away. She fills the drawer with spare nappies and wipes.

Adam and his parents are off buying a cot and clothes for the newborn.

There is no more room for questions. She has a daughter now.

She breastfeeds her girl, and waits for peace to fill the hole that was burned in her.

Chapter 24

‘Please don’t tell anyone.’

Please, just don’t say nothing.

Becky has spent the day in silence.