Jenny was rigid in the bed, palms pressed down on the blanket, fingers digging in. “That was the one thing we still had going for us: nobody knew. I kept on telling myself over and over, At least we’ve got that. As long as people thought we were doing great, we had a chance of getting back up and doing great again. If people think you’re some kind of lunatic losers, they start treating you like lunatic losers, and then you’re screwed. Totally screwed.”

If that’s how everyone treats you, I had said to Richie, then that’s how you feel. How is that different? I said, “There are professionals. Counselors, therapists. Anything you said to someone like that would have been confidential.”

“And have him say Pat was nuts, and cart him off to some loony bin where he actually would have gone crazy? No. Pat didn’t need a therapist. All Pat needed was a job, so he wouldn’t have all this time to freak out about nothing, so he’d have to go to bed at a decent hour instead of …” Jenny shoved the drawing away, so violently that it fluttered off the bed, glided to rest by my foot with an ugly rasping sound. “I just had to hold things together till he could get a job again. That was all. And I couldn’t do that if everyone knew. When I’d pick up Emma from school, and her teacher would smile at me and be like, ‘Oh, isn’t Emma’s reading getting so much better,’ or whatever, just like I was a normal mummy going home to a normal house—that was the only time I felt normal. I needed that. That was the only thing getting me through. If she’d given me some awful sympathetic smile and a pat on the arm, because she’d found out that Emma’s daddy was in a nuthouse, I’d have curled up and died, right there on the classroom floor.”

The air felt solid with heat. For a stab of a second I saw me and Dina, maybe fourteen and five, me jerking her arm behind her back at the school gates: Shut up, you shut up, you don’t ever talk about Mum outside the house or I’ll break your arm— The high steam-whistle shriek out of her, and the stomach-turning free-fall pleasure of yanking her wrist higher. I leaned down to pick up the drawing, so I could hide my face.

Jenny said, “I never wanted all that much. I wasn’t one of those ambitious types who want to be a pop star or a CEO or an It girl. All I wanted was to be normal.”

All the force had ebbed out of her voice, leaving it drained and wan. I laid the drawing back on the bed; she didn’t seem to notice. “That’s why you didn’t send Jack back to preschool, isn’t it?” I said. “Not because of the money. Because he was saying he’d heard the animal, and you were afraid he’d say it there.”