“I’ll talk to Trish tomorrow,” he said. From the corner of my eye I saw him touching his bruises. “She’ll pull through. Her dad’s all right. He’ll convince himself he didn’t see anything unusual, didn’t see anything at all, and that Mrs Scott—your mum, I mean—has flown … left town. She’s not the first. We’ll be— We’ll manage.”

“You do this a lot, Gary Damson?” I asked, bracingly, instead of saying Did you see what I saw? Don’t you know what I’ve done?

“Just trying to convince myself.” I didn’t look away from the road, but I heard his smile. “Mum won’t mind putting you up. You can stay with us.”

“Your mother doesn’t like me.”

“She didn’t like that you were a Scott.”

“And now I’m a … thing?” A motherless, murdering thing.

“You’re not,” he said, with slightly foggy earnestness. “That’s real blood. I’ll take you home to clean up—”

Home. I still had responsibilities. I had to feed the chooks. Clean the house. Let Mr Alleman, watching over his hedge of lantern-bush, think I was ignorant of our shared histories. Pretend—just until dawn—that everything was as I once believed it to be, before I woke to the whispering blue lace of tree shadows, the awareness of the greater world of Inglewell beyond.

Closer to Runagate, we began to glimpse the lights of farmhouses through the trees. Were the people in them living quiet, inoffensive lives, or did everyone in Inglewell have a secret? People other than us, afraid they weren’t entirely human, that a chamber of their heart opened onto caverns. Or sky.

I drove past the petrol station, its sign dim; past the grocery store, dark; the postmaster’s night garden. I pulled into Upper Spicer Street and stopped at our house. My house. My mother had left the lights on; moths beat at the windows, but she would never come home to see them.

“She got rid of so many of my dad’s things,” I said. “We had a fire then, too. What if I never understand everything that’s happened, or what to do next?”

“You’ll work it out,” said Gary. “I mean, presumably your dad learned from scratch. I guess he’s not the best example. But you understand. You’ll work out what you need to know.”

“I know Trish is in shock,” I said, struggling with the door handle. I slid down to stand in the driveway. Everything hurt. “And I know you got knocked out, so maybe you were still dazed when you heard what Chris was saying about my dad and when—when everything else happened. Which means you were still knocked out when Chris told me what my dad did. But you weren’t surprised.”