She closes her eyes. For one second, she lies, in the dark, in the heather. She smells the peat, the moss. She smells the grass, dry and rich. She smells Jack, the sweat of him, and a sharper, more subtle smell. An old smell, older than the moors and the forest and the rocks.

Then she sits up. Aaron’s trembling, but he smiles at her. After all, this isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.

‘Again?’ says Andy.

‘She’s your sister,’ replies Paula.

Titch is coming next weekend. Last minute. She has an idea, she says. About Rose.

Andy and Paula are sitting at the front of their house. Paula is in her running gear, ready to go. She drinks a glass of water, he drinks a beer. The colours of the trees are turning, drifting into brittle browns and yellows, cooling and hardening. The air is sharp, but the garden is a suntrap. Andy’s hair is too long, flying high in odd strands above his thinning scalp. His face is pleasingly lined, narrow eyed. Paula feels the stirrings of desire. In recent years, it has been intermittent, but fierce when it comes. They have months without, then weeks with nothing but. It feels seasonal, timed to the pull of something neither of them can see.

Paula really doesn’t want Titch around.

They last saw her three weeks ago. They visited her in London. When they arrived, the girl was there.

‘Don’t worry,’ smiled Titch. ‘Rose is leaving soon.’

Rose was on the sofa. Sprawled out like she was relaxing, but Paula had seldom seen anyone look less relaxed. She didn’t know Rose well, yet had seen her daily for years. She had seen her as that stick-thin year seven in red glittery heels, and then as the withdrawn teen who walked around like the world didn’t exist. She’d seen Rose, or at least the shape of Rose, hidden behind a curtain of hair at a PEP meeting, while her social worker and her carer spoke for her. And she’d spoken to her last year, when she started sixth form, when the two of them caught five minutes on the first day.

Looking at Rose, on Titch’s sofa, Paula had such a vivid memory of that conversation. They ducked into an empty room to talk. Rose said very little. But she met Paula’s eyes. She smiled, and she held her head straight and looked at Paula. Her face was greasy, but clear, neither childlike nor adult. Her smile came and went easily, underwritten by a kind of nervous carelessness, like she wasn’t aware of how it looked, or that it could be seen at all.

‘I’m so happy you’ve come back for sixth form,’ Paula had said. ‘You let me know if there is anything we can do.’

Rose’s smile had lodged in Paula’s mind that day, and she couldn’t shake it. She looked at Rose on Titch’s sofa. Her hair washed and cut, her legs long and frozen with awkwardness.