‘I didn’t know it was Scotland,’ I said, and I could hear how tight and scared my voice was. ‘He asked me to go with him. He wanted me and him to go, but not Sasha. He hasn’t been happy with her since she told him she was pregnant, and recently he’s gone absolutely mental about it. He’s been awful to her. I said I didn’t want to go, so he just drove off and stuck his keys back through the letterbox. And that’s the truth.’

‘Now this time,’ said Mr Morrow, ‘I believe you.’

‘So I’m going to be absolutely fine living with Sasha,’ I finished, too loudly, adding stupidly, ‘I was concentrating really hard in physics just now. We were doing atomic structure.’

Inverness?

I couldn’t believe Dad had gone that far. Inverness was (I was quite hazy about this) maybe six hundred miles away? If he started driving at about six this morning, which he had, then he probably hadn’t even got there yet. He might have crashed on the way. I was sure he hadn’t slept last night, and his driving was shit and aggressive at the best of times.

He must have been planning this for ages if he had a job all sorted. He’d known about Sasha’s baby for a couple of months. Had he started job-hunting the moment she told him? What the hell kind of parenting was that?

People were supposed to be pleased at becoming grandparents. Or shocked, but then come round to the idea. They weren’t supposed to run away in the night and move to Scotland. I wondered what it was like in Inverness. What would my new school have been like, if I’d gone? Was there a school register somewhere up there with my name on it? Was a teacher I didn’t know going to say, ‘Ariel Brown?’ tomorrow morning and wonder why no one was answering?

And then I started to imagine what life would be like without Dad. If he had really gone – if he wasn’t going to come back – then it might be …

Lovely.

I tuned back in sharply at the words ‘social services’.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t need social services. We don’t need anything like that. We’re fine as we are.’

‘You know, Ariel,’ said Mr M, ‘I actually believe that you’re probably right. That staying where you are, with Sasha, will be much the least disruptive path. That’s my point really. We do have to contact social services, so they can check that both Sasha and you are all right. It’s a positive thing. Not a scary one. Is Sasha’s partner involved?’