Then I remembered I wasn’t doing this any more. I didn’t need to find Troy: I needed to take my exams. This was no longer my thing.

I started to feel angry. I squashed it down.

I didn’t think anyone had directly told me to fuck off before.

I was never going to live in the cloud tops of Venus.

We had kind of kissed and then I’d been dumped by a ghost.

Dumped by a fucking ghost!

It made me boil with rage.

I didn’t care about Troy. He was just some grumpy old man. Of course he didn’t want to talk about it. I tried to imagine, nineteen years from now, if someone who wasn’t even born yet contacted me because they were writing a stupid little article about the anniversary of Mum’s death and wanted some quotes from me. I wouldn’t want to talk to them either. I’d definitely want to tell them to fuck off too.

‘I know we’ve dropped the Joe thing,’ I told Izzy when we met on the corner, ‘but look at this.’ I forwarded her the message. She looked at it and winced.

‘Whoa,’ she said. ‘He sounds nice.’

‘Right? Anyway, fuck him.’

She tucked her arm through mine. ‘Yeah. He makes himself sound guilty.’

‘He wouldn’t kill his best friend, though. Would he?’ That hung there for a while and then I shook myself. ‘So. Did your mum book the holiday?’

‘Not yet, but I think we’re going to Spain. Tally might come too. Do you think you and Sasha will go away? Oh, of course not. The baby!’

‘I don’t think we would have anyway. It would be weird, me and Sasha going on holiday.’ I thought a few years ahead and perked up. ‘It’ll be lovely, though, to take the baby away, in a year or two. We could go to …’ I tried to remember where people went on holiday with small kids. ‘Mallorca or something. I don’t know. Not a city break, but somewhere with nice safe beaches.’

Plans like this made me happy. They were the future.

38

It’s a Monday in 2019, so I’m sitting on the train with Lara. Today she’s knitting a little jumper with the beginning of the letter M on it.

‘Knowing that she’s Mabel,’ she says, ‘has changed everything, even though it changes nothing. You finding that out for me is the most exciting thing that’s happened since I died. My great regret was always that I wouldn’t ever know, and now I do. And I know that the birth goes well, considering that she’s healthy twenty years later. I do think sometimes that you might be making it up, but mainly I believe you. I believe in Mabel.’

‘You should believe in her,’ I say. ‘I’m not making it up. Why would I?’