Hazel feels as though she’s in a dream. She can’t remember the last time she went inside another person’s house, unless you count the counsellor’s, which is a poky semi in Milton containing an enormous TV and a number of rather dubious fish. Hazel watches them swimming up and down behind glass at Moira’s shoulder, their unblinking eyes filled with suspicion. They make her freeze when Moira asks things like, ‘So when did you first feel the need to make everything symmetrical?’ or ‘What makes you think your mother hated you?’

Hazel glances at Virginia. She is cutting up her bacon with cool precision, squaring her knife and fork, discarding rind, as if performing a well-practised dissection. She smiles at Hazel, an open, friendly smile without guile or agenda.

‘Nice bacon,’ says Hazel and she realises, with a frisson of surprise, that she has said this spontaneously, without any planning at all. Usually, she needs to plan to avoid saying inappropriate things.

‘Yeah,’ mumbles Harry. He wipes his plate with a piece of toast and swallows it at speed. Hazel tries not to look at the greasy smear across his chin or the glistening lips.

‘I gotta go!’ His chair screams across the floor. He stands up. Hazel winces.

‘Just tell your mother I gave you bacon and she’ll be fine,’ Virginia tells him.

Hazel is surprised. ‘Oh, do you and Harry’s mum know each other, then?’ (She didn’t have to think about that one either.)

‘Yes, Harry comes to church, and occasionally his mum does, too,’ says Virginia, collecting the cups. ‘Don’t you, Harry?’ Her smile is almost playful.

‘Well,’ he picks up his paper bag, ‘only when they need me on sound. When Brian’s away.’

‘Church?’ Hazel doesn’t understand. She can understand this rather prophetic-looking woman being part of a church (the Church of Latter-day Saints, perhaps? She looks rather saint-like). But this teenager? Who uses swear words and has spots, and dribbles grease on his chin after bacon? Surely not.

Virginia is brisk. ‘Yes, the church on the corner. By the way, what were you doing out so early in the morning, Hazel?’

Hazel puts her knife and fork together at six-thirty. She looks up. They are both watching her. Their knives and forks are at three-fifteen. Hazel gives what she hopes is a surreptitious glance down and moves hers to three-fifteen too. The kitchen is quiet, but it is a kind silence, not like the ones at work when everyone is staring at her or exchanging meaningful looks they think she cannot see. Or even the one at Moira’s, which is cool, appraising, as if her words are being measured against some kind of psychological average, compared with which she is almost certainly failing.

‘I don’t sleep well so I get up early and walk.’ She speaks carefully. ‘I… I’ve been advised to walk for… for health reasons.’