‘I had surgery.’

‘Obvs.’

The griddle smokes and she lifts it up and slides my toastie out onto a plate. I don’t even remind her to put the blob of salad cream on the side – she just remembers. Except it isn’t salad cream. It’s called Miracle Whip.

‘The fuck is this?’

‘It tastes the same.’

I dip my toast point in the blob and lick it. ‘You’ve been living here too long. It tastes like shit.’ I look up at her. Her hand goes straight to the gun.

‘You never said anything. In the diaries. About… me,’ she says.

‘You read Freddie’s book?’

‘He sent me a copy. He wants me to talk to him for his sequel. I won’t.’

‘I said plenty about you.’

‘But you never mentioned… what you saw at Honey Cottage.’

‘I told you I wouldn’t.’

She tidies up the condiments, wipes the counter, even though it doesn’t need wiping. ‘It’s the one question he keeps asking me. All the journalists ask me – Why does Rhiannon go after sex offenders? Why paedophiles? Is it because she was molested as a child?’

‘And what do you tell them?’

‘Nothing. I think that’s what I find so hard – is it my fault you turned out the way you did?’

‘Why would it be your fault?’

‘Because that’s when you turned. That summer when you saw what Grandad was doing to me. Yeah, you did bad stuff to me before that, your personality changed after Priory Gardens, but we were bringing you back, me and Mom and Dad. It was working. You were coming back to us. Then we went to Honey Cottage that summer and… you flipped.’

‘Do you remember that conversation we had that night, lying on top of the hay bales in the back field?’

‘I’ve blacked a lot of those summers out.’

‘You said to me, “While he’s got me, he won’t touch you.” That’s when I knew, one way or another, Grandad was going to die. I saw him hit you that morning when you forgot to bring in the eggs. And later when he was doing that stuff to you in the barn…’

She scrunches her face like she’s got sudden brain freeze.

‘I was going to push him down the stairs, or stab him when we went on that picnic at Ogmore – I hid the kitchen knife in my bag. I was going to do it. I was planning to lure him into the long grasses, saying I’d found a dead bird.’

Seren’s fully crying by this time. ‘And you’d never have said a word, would you?’ I shake my head. ‘Nanny was so mad at you. “Why didn’t you help him? Why didn’t you call for me?”’

‘You smiled at me, at his funeral.’