“I’ll go to the police,” I say. He hears the tremble in my voice. It makes him smile again.

“No you won’t. What would you say? You saw a disabled girl running away from you? They’d laugh at you—think the trauma had got to you. If she wanted to be rescued, why would she run? Come on, Cara, think! We know everything about you. We know where you live, where you work. I went past your mum’s just now. She’s on her own, isn’t she? You’ve seen what happens when we get angry. Don’t do it to your mum, you’re all she’s got now.” The hairs all over my body rise as his words flow like a flood of freezing water through me.

“I keep thinking, about a barrel of petrol and a match,” he says in his quiet voice. “What a show that would be.”

I see Mum asleep on the sofa, then her eyes flip open and her skin starts to bubble and melt. I press my hands down onto the barbed wire behind me, feel it slide out of me, the shock of it makes me panic. I try to move away from the edge, but he won’t let me go, he forces me back again. I cry out as the barbed wire presses like a dagger but he just keeps talking, his soft words like drugs straight into my blood. I try to twist my face away from him, but he’s everywhere.

“I know all about you and you don’t even know my name.” He’s smiling again. I turn away, cover my face with my hands as he whispers right in my ear.

“That’s it, Cara, good girl, keep your eyes and your mouth shut and you’ll be safe, but open them and I swear to God you’ll wish you listened to me.”

I feel him pull away, but I don’t move my hands, don’t open my eyes. Fear has welded them shut. I fall to my knees, low, like I’m about to be executed. My breath is hard and jagged, my lungs feel full, sharp, small sacks of broken glass. I feel a line of blood ripple down my back. I smell the earth, ageless and wet with dew. I see Grace snarl and run away through the graves. I see Meg’s forehead smashed, blood dark and sticky, then I see Mum’s eyes flash open and I curl myself up tighter and I pray for it all to stop, to end now, and I keep low, curled on the ground, and hope the early morning sun will bleach it all away.

4th June 2019

If someone’s reading this it means I’ve either been arrested or I’m dead. Either way, at least one person—you—will know what really happened to me, Zoe Grace Megan Nichols. Everything people think they know about me is a lie. The truth is this: I was never the sick one. She was.

Those are the only words I want to write. I could write them again and again and never grow tired. But this isn’t a diary for me. I’m writing this for you, whoever you are. An explanation of sorts, so you know who she really was, how she made me sick, kept me small and stunted, her eternal little girl. I need you to know that when she squeezed my hand she was controlling, not comforting, me. When she read medical journals she was looking for ways to make me sick, not heal me. She kept me in a wheelchair until my muscles became so weak they forgot how to work and all the while she called it love. I need you to know all of this.