“Think about it, Cara, think hard. What happened when Mum came in?” I focus on the fringe of the memory. I remember thinking Mum and Meg would be pleased that I’d made Grace laugh after so long. Grace kept laughing when they appeared in the doorway. Mum looked uneasy; she kept casting quick, nervous glances at Meg because her face was frozen, a fixed mask of rage. She stared at Grace as though her laughter appalled her. Finally, Grace sensed her mum’s stare and stopped laughing immediately. She looked winded, as though she’d just been punched in the stomach. Laughter extinguished, as easy as snuffing out a flame. When she saw the way Meg was looking at her Grace let out a small whine and then her eyes came back to meet mine. Her mouth opened and started to move. She was trying to say something to me before she started to gag and her tiny body started flipping in her bed. Suddenly she was heaving. I touched her arm, it was wet with sweat but I was too clumsy, too slow, and Meg had to push me out of the way to bring a cardboard tub under Grace’s mouth as she quietly vomited. I edged away from her bed, towards the safety of my own mum, and I buried what I thought I heard Grace say into the deepest, most hidden coils of my brain: “Help me.”

“You remember, don’t you?” the new Grace says now. I taste salt on my lip, touch my face; it’s soaking. I didn’t even notice I was crying. She hasn’t answered my question but she’s shown me how far I was from seeing what was in front of me. How far I still am from understanding the depths of Meg’s abuse.

“I have so many memories like that. Times someone almost found out what she was doing to me. But it was like none of you wanted to see the truth so you became blind to it, to me. So I studied you and others instead. I watched you. I was good at watching people. I had to be, it was the only way I’d learn anything about the world. Through watching you I learned what I could about relationships, about being a young woman. I listened to Susie moan to my mum about you, about your arguments, problems you were having, her fears for you. You taught me so much without even knowing it. Like it or not, you are part of my awakening.”

I feel my mouth move to say the only thing I can think of.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Grace . . . Zoe.” It’s the first time I’ve said the name, her real name, but she doesn’t acknowledge it—apologies are no good to her.

She doesn’t speak for a moment, just stares out to sea as though expecting something or someone to wash up on the moonlit waves before she says, “You know, I’ve never been here before, to the place Danny died. I thought about it a lot over the years, how it would be to come here. I thought it’d be different somehow, that maybe being here would help me make some sense of everything that’s happened.”