I was bewildered. Nothing had happened. He had just—gone. I ought to be afraid of Gary Damson, I thought faintly. I’d run from him yesterday, and he was angry now. But I was remembering how Gary brought the newspaper to show us that headline, laughing and heartless, and made my mother white-angry. My face warmed: her fury at my brothers was such a private thing to have overheard. A Family Matter. The sort of thing polite people, if they chanced to overhear, never mentioned.

“I’ll ride home,” I said.

But Gary hit the accelerator. The tyres sprayed gravel, and I closed my eyes, hands braced on the glovebox.

The taste of blood, the smell of burned rubber.

“Stop, I’ll tell you! She-was-angry-with-them-and-with-my-father-for-encouraging-them-and-they-fought-and-he-left.” Words sharp as shattered glass. That was it; I had that right.

The truck no longer felt so dangerously fast. I opened one eye, then the other. A vision of wheeling stars vanished. We were proceeding almost sedately through town. I smoothed my hair, sat up straighter.

“What about you?” he said. His blunt fingers drummed on the wheel.

“Me?”

“Was she angry with you?”

You were home asleep, like a good girl, weren’t you, Bettina?

“Why would she be?” I said coldly.

We stopped in front of my house. Gary looked at me in disgust.

“Thank you for the lift, Mr Damson,” I said with as much dignity as I could manage, and climbed out. I hauled the bicycle from the back and dropped it onto the road with a damaging bounce.

“You are a coward,” he said. “We covered for you, you know.”

I wheeled the bicycle to the garage, hosed off the crusting mud, checked the new chicks cheeping contentedly under their lamp, and went to sit by the lemon tree until I was calmer and my shoe was dry. Bees were heavy around my shoulders and hair. They rose on the warm morning air up to the windows, the gutters.

My mother would hear Gary Damson had been by our house. Twice in two days, causing trouble where none was wanted. But this time, I—mature, sensible Bettina—had gone looking for him. To spare her. To spare myself. You coward, Tink.

The kitchen smelled of lemon curd and toast, as I had left it. My note—Out For Milk—lay untruthful on the table. Blight on a perfect leaf. The stairs settled heavily as I went up.

The scent of citrus and too-sweet smoke thickened as I eased open the door of my mother’s room. She was fully dressed, shoes and stockings on, her feet neatly together. A faint smile bloomed on her lovely face, yet I hated seeing her asleep, hollow as a cicada shell, as a lantern-flower. Her letters lay open on the bed. She could hardly leave Runagate and me, but it felt as if she were a world away. If only for a few hours, she too had left me.