‘How’s Graeme?’

His eyes gleam.

‘Still perving?’

She says nothing.

‘Yes,’ says Aaron.

‘Don’t blame him,’ says Jack.

Aaron finishes the joint. He lights it. The paper crackles, and the thick smoke wafts across the three of them. He passes it to Rose. She draws on it. She holds the smoke inside her. The warmth of it rises inside her. She leans back. The sun is warm. The smoke drifts up from her open mouth.

She closes her eyes for a second. She feels the sun on her eyelids.

She passes the joint to Jack. She watches him inhale, then she looks back out to the moor, and the valley. It seems to her that this might be the last time she is here. She hasn’t said it to anyone yet. But it is over. The last ties are cut – Dillon cut them. She has escaped.

She swallows the thin clear air. In the distance a tiny car beetles along a narrow ribbon of road over the moor. The damp of the old house sits in her nostrils.

She won’t go back.

The thought sets off a complicated ache inside her for Aaron. He will come too – she has the story in her head. He will come and live with her. But he is also Aaron.

When he was small, he was so small. When he was five, he looked like a three-year-old. When he was seven, the year before they went to Graeme’s house, he broke his arm. A friend of her mother’s grabbed him by the arm and shook him, and it broke.

He’s tall, now. He eats like he’s making up for all he missed out on. But he’s still brittle.

Jack reaches across her. She smells the rich stink of his armpit. He passes the joint back to Aaron.

Rose feels the rock behind her. The smooth curve, the gritty texture. Aaron on one side, Jack on the other. She won’t do this again, and she’s glad, but she’s also sad for them. For all of them. She remembers the day she saw her mother in a doorway in Manchester, on a school trip. She was asleep, and she’d soiled herself.

The weak sunlight warms her face. The weed is good. But it makes her ache. Sometimes calm is painful. You slow down, and you have to look at things full on.

‘So you’re going to forget all about us,’ says Jack.

His eyes have a warmth to them that Rose remembers. They used to sit in her room, looking at the pictures on her wall. Looking at the houses, and the figurines, and the clothes.

‘No.’

No, she won’t. Because he’s her brother too. She’s heard him cry at night.

‘You will.’

His voice is flat. A statement.

She can feel the lack in him. He is missing something wonderful, something that makes us whole, and he knows it. She had Aaron. He had no one.