I shrug. ‘Yeah, I’m sure you’ll get away with this. You’ll get away with it forever, but you’ll never be the same again. You will never be the same person and you’ll never forgive yourself. But yes. You’ll get away with both of us. I know that.’

I feel his hand on my shoulder.

‘You wouldn’t know who to tell. You don’t even know my name.’

‘Alexander Brown.’ I wonder how I knew this first time round. Maybe I read it on his badge.

He swings me round. Yes, there’s his name in tiny letters on that lanyard. I wish I’d bothered to read it on one of the many thousands of times I’ve seen him over the past twenty years.

Whatever those pills were that he just took, they’ve done something, or maybe he’s just like this anyway, or it could be adrenaline or God knows what. Whatever it is, there’s something inhuman in his eyes. Something insane.

He pushes me up against the back wall. I make an effort and laugh in his face. Because I just want it to end. Then he leans down to the bench and picks something up, and then he’s swinging his arm back and I see that, after all that, it’s the football trophy.

‘You’re not telling anyone,’ he says.

The murder weapon. That fucking football trophy.

His arm swings forward. The trophy catches me on what I know must be the very worst part of my head.

Everything

goes

blank.

And then everything is new.

51

26 October 2019

I sat in a pew near the back of the chapel, between Sasha and Izzy, and I let myself cry. Sasha had Raffy on her lap, and she was crying too, much to Raffy’s confusion. I understood the toxic blend of grief and guilt that was running through her. She hadn’t known Joe (well, only a tiny bit, on the days he’d spoken to her when she was a baby, days that didn’t happen in her real life). She was crying for Mum, and because she was a mother looking at Jasper and Gus and Claire, and she could probably imagine something of the pain they’d carried for all these years.

The guilt, though. That was the worst thing. Our dad had killed Joe and the horror of that was too big, no matter how much anyone said it wasn’t our fault. All those lists I’d made, the lists of suspects. They’d always focused on Lucas and Troy, with ‘angry man at the mall’ as an afterthought at the bottom of the page.

We had to learn to live with it. We had to add it to the fundamental facts about ourselves.