He took my bowl to the sink. ‘Nothin’. I heard a rumour your sister called the cops on you. If it were me, I’d want her fuckin’ barbecued.’

‘I’m not you.’

‘So you forgive the bitch for what she did?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But you don’t want her dead?’ He sat back down on my stool.

‘There are other people more deserving of that outcome than her.’

He snickered. ‘Is that a threat?’

‘Not yet.’

Paco didn’t respond to that, just left the room, nodding. He wasn’t done though. He had another trick parked up his sleeve to needle me with and it came later that day as he drove me home from my four-hour nose job. There weren’t enough painkillers in the world.

‘What happened to your baby, Rhiannon?’

My head throbbed all over and my voice was croaky. ‘None of your business.’

‘She called Ivy, yes?’

‘Say what you’re gonna say.’

‘I was just asking.’

‘Why?’

‘Because. We are friends, yes?’

‘No.’

‘Well, what are we?’

‘We are nothing,’ I spat, resisting the urge to sniff up my nose plugs. ‘You are a vaginal polyp. The pus in a festering boil. A cancerous tumour. And the sooner you’re cut out, the better.’ It would have sounded a lot more threatening if my voice hadn’t been so whispery,

‘Your baby’s going to die without you, without her mother’s milk,’ he sang after me in his strange, immature way.

He was like a live-in troll. He’d say anything for a reaction. And as soon as I realised that, it became easier to ignore him. Don’t feed the trolls. Pretend they don’t exist. They hate that.

I didn’t look in the mirror until I got up to my bedroom – I looked as though I’d been on a skid pan with Stuntman Mike. The surgeon had broken my nose for the procedure so I had chronic head pain, puffy eyes and purple bruising around the centre of my face for two weeks. I peeked behind the compression tape to see if the swelling had gone down – I kept doing this so that was probably why it took longer to heal. My nostrils had to be packed out with gauze plugs and I lost my voice completely for a few days because of the breathing tube they’d shoved down me during the op. I was so tired, all the time, and they recommended that I sleep upright which didn’t help matters.

The boys didn’t recognise me when they first saw me that following morning. Saúl wouldn’t even come into my bedroom.

‘It’s OK, I hurt my nose so I had to have it mended,’ I told him. ‘I won’t look like this forever.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked David, gingerly sitting down on the edge of my bed.

‘Yeah. Like a son-of-a-fuh— …yeah, it’s pretty painful. Mucho dolor.’