GoodSam and ForeverGrace started messaging each other every day. I just wanted a friend, a normal friend. He told me about music he liked, gigs he was going to, he even said he’d take me to one. He didn’t understand when I said I couldn’t, that Mum would never let me. I didn’t mean to tell him what she was doing. The words just fell out of me and then I couldn’t get them back. After that we didn’t talk about music anymore. He said I was brave, thanked me for being honest with him, said that he wanted to be honest with me. He told me he’d had a bad life. That his mum died just a few months before Danny drowned, that a couple of years later his dad left him and his brother to fend for themselves. He said he only realized recently that the guilt of not helping Danny all those years ago still consumed him, made him angry, prone to violence. The twins were put into separate foster homes when they were teenagers and Tony fell in with a bad crowd. He told me he’d just left prison but said he was different now. He’d taken a course while he was in prison that made him realize how he could change his life. He wanted to be a better person, to make up for mistakes he’d made in the past. He was in Plymouth when he saw my dad, walking along a road. Tony tried to talk to him but Dad got upset, angry. But a few days later Dad contacted him and said the only way Tony could make up for not helping Danny was to help me. Tony said we weren’t so different, me and him, we’d both been trapped in lives we didn’t choose. He said he was my friend, that he was going to help. At first he said we should call the police, tell them what Mum was doing to me, but I said no. Even after everything I didn’t want to punish Mum. So Tony started making up plans for how I could get away. I thought we were playing, messing around, like I know friends do. But I know nothing about friendship and didn’t know anything about Tony, not really. He wasn’t joking. I said I wanted her to wake up one morning, come into my room, and find me gone. I told him I just wanted a chance at a new life. He said he understood. But it’s only now I know he didn’t, he didn’t understand at all.

At first, I just watched her. Counted how many pills she took from each bottle, how she ground them all up together in the pestle and mortar, how she mixed them with my food before sucking it all up into the plastic syringe and fixing it to the hole in my stomach. She let me count out my pills. Then, after a while, she let me grind. She was watching me grind my pills one evening when the doorbell rang. While Mum talked to Susie about what color she should dye her hair I hid three of the pills in my underwear and ground up some extra acetaminophen so Mum didn’t notice the difference when I showed her the powder. She kissed me, called me a good girl, before I leant back on the bed and lifted up my top.