Paula knows this boy will never forgive her, not if she talks about rules and conduct and safeguarding for the next hour.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

He frowns. She can see she hasn’t soothed him. There is another betrayal in apologising, like she knows he’s right, but she still won’t change anything.

She tries again. ‘Once something is out of the bag, it can’t go back in. The whole school was talking about it. It would have been worse if we hadn’t investigated.’

His face clouds. Up until now he has seemed almost a man. But the boy in him breaks through.

‘It’s not fair.’

The sharpness of the pain takes Paula by surprise. The echo of another boy, lip out, protesting at life. She concentrates on Dillon. The room is a little smaller, and he is a little closer.

She begins to speak, but then catches herself. Outside, a whistle blows and a bell rings. A noise swells in the building, doors bang, and she can hear the shouts of kids as they leave for the holidays. They rise and echo between the high walls of the school buildings, joyful and angry, wild and innocent, loud, crackling with energy.

Paula holds herself carefully. She is high up, balancing on something. She waits, and Dillon waits. Then she steps forward into the pain, because she always does.

‘I had a conversation, once.’ She swallows. ‘I said something similar.’ She hesitates again. She senses the space beneath her, the great empty void of freedom.

‘I was talking to my mother.’

He looks at her, surprised.

‘I asked her why it should be fair that a particular thing would happen.’

She finds the memory, a smoothed stone of hard-won comfort that she has held tight in her fist for many years.

‘I asked her why it should be that my life would have this … gap.’ She pauses. Her mother’s hands were paper skinned. They sat in her lap, curled, thick knuckled. When she held them, the fingers moved around hers with stiff tenderness.

‘She was quite old.’

She died soon after.

‘She said that she didn’t know anyone who didn’t have a gap in their lives.’

Paula’s mouth turns up wryly at one side, an unexpectedly mischievous movement.

‘She was pretty blunt, my mum. What she actually said was she didn’t know anyone who didn’t have a gaping fucking hole in their life.’

Dillon is looking at her in astonishment. She smiles fully at him, now, a warm smile. Her angular face slips with surprising ease into kindliness. ‘What she meant was just that sooner or later we all lose something. And we go through life hungry to fill the space it left.’

I’m sorry it happened so soon, for you, she thinks.

‘We can’t regain what we lose. We never stop being hungry. But we can find something else that might take the edge off it.’