Rhi camps in my bed and we spend the night arguing over what Troy meant with the weird things he’d whispered. Neither of us expects him to have the balls to turn up and confess in the broad light of day. But that’s okay, we’d only been on a fact-finding mission.

The people after him must somehow have known he’d palmed this necklace off to Laney. Hell, he probably told them. Rhi and I don’t agree on exactly who has Laney, but I ignore Rhi’s arguments and point to the Potters and their neo-Nazi ways as enough bad guys to be facing without having to make up boogie men. Eventually she gives up. We do agree that Rhi is going to talk to Tyrone again, this time alone, to see if he knows more. I ignore her eyebrow wiggle. While she sorts that, I’m going to school to pretend things are as normal as they can be right now. I try to fight her on that one but she won’t budge.

Eventually she falls asleep. I lie awake. Listening.

Day 4, Daylight

Day 4, Daylight

I hear Mum moving around in the pre-dawn but don’t get up. Uncle Joe’s and Aunty Mel’s cars pull up at the front and I listen to the murmurs from the kitchen. It is so familiar, and so wrong. I try to keep my mind blank. The lack of sleep is helping.

Mum ducks her head in and blows me a kiss. Aunty Mel looks in at her wayward daughter, shaking her head with a smile and waving before heading off by herself. No one bothers asking why I am awake. The bags under my eyes are almost as bad as theirs. The only upside to not sleeping is no nightmares.

Rhi doesn’t even twitch when I hop up and get ready for school. I walk out the door to the sound of her snoring.

I ignore my churning guts. I am early again and alone, and it is all wrong.

School is filled with attempts to catch Sam’s eye and trying to figure out how the hell I am going to talk to him without anyone seeing. It might’ve been his normal way of operating, it’s not like we spent much time staring at each other before this week, but there isn’t even a casual glance.

I’m brimming with anxiety, almost dancing in my chair with it. Why won’t Sam look at me? Is he feeling guilty about something? Has he changed his mind? Oh my God, what if he has? What am I going to do? I don’t want to go out to the Potters’ on my own.

My frustration with Sam gets so bad that by the last class I’ve had enough. It’s my free period for distance education study in the library, while all the others have manual arts across the oval.