She was searching my face, scanning for any particle of doubt. “I swear to God, I didn’t imagine it. You can look. I wrapped the pin up in a piece of tissue—I didn’t even want to touch it—and stuck it in my pocket. When Pat woke up I was praying he’d say something about it, like, ‘Oh, did you find your present?’ but of course he didn’t. So I took it upstairs and folded it in a jumper, in my bottom drawer. Go look. It’s there.”

“I know,” I said gently. “We found it.”

“See? See? It was real! I actually …” Jenny’s face ducked away from mine for a second; her voice, when she started talking again, had a muffled sound to it. “I actually wondered, at first. I was … I told you what things had been like. I thought I could actually be seeing things. So I stuck the pin into my thumb, deep—it bled for ages. I knew I couldn’t be imagining that, right? All day, I couldn’t think about anything else—I went straight through a red light on the way to get Emma. But at least when I started getting scared that I’d hallucinated the whole thing, I could look at my thumb and go, OK, a hallucination didn’t do that.”

“But you were still upset.”

“Well, yeah, obviously I was. I could only come up with two answers, and they were both … they were bad. Either that same person had broken in again and left it there—except I checked the alarm, and it was on; and anyway, how would anyone know about JoJo’s? It would have to be someone who’d been stalking me, finding out everything about my whole entire life, and now they wanted me to know they knew—” She shuddered. “I felt like a crazy person even thinking about it. Stuff like that doesn’t happen, except in the movies. But the only other thing I could think of was that I actually still had my badge somewhere, and I had done the whole thing myself—gone and dug it out, put it down in the kitchen. And I didn’t remember anything about it. And that would mean …”

Jenny stared up at the ceiling, blinking to keep the tears back. “It’s one thing doing everyday stuff, autopilot stuff, and forgetting about it—going to the shop or taking a shower, things I would’ve done anyway. But if I was doing stuff like digging out that badge, crazy stuff that didn’t make any sense … then I could do anything. Anything. I could get up one morning and look in the mirror and realize I’d shaved my head or painted my face green. I could go to pick Emma up from school one day and find the teacher and all the other mums not talking to me, and I wouldn’t have a clue why.”

She was panting, working for each breath like the wind had been knocked out of her. “And the kids. Oh, God, the kids. How was I supposed to protect them, if I couldn’t tell what I was going to do the next second? How would I even know if I’d been keeping them safe or if I’d, I’d—I couldn’t even tell what I was scared of doing, because I wouldn’t know till it happened. Thinking about it made me want to get sick. It was like I could feel the pin upstairs, wiggling, trying to get out of the drawer. Every time I put my hand in my pocket, I was terrified I’d find it there.”