I make my body go completely floppy to try to help my mind relax, but it doesn’t. Everything seems to be marching through me at once. I don’t know how I feel because I’m feeling everything, no single emotion rests for long. As soon as I feel thick with sadness, a blaze of white anger passes through me, and then the anger is immediately replaced with a deep, queasy guilt. I’m a hostage. I see Meg’s dead, bulging eyes again, I hear the drip, drip. In death she was staring so hard, like she was trying to get one last message to the living world. I know what she wanted—the only thing she’s ever wanted: for Grace to be safe. My eyes start to blur and I feel tears rise up in me in a sickening wave. I try to focus on my breathing but my head is too full of noise. My eyes dart around my small childhood room, searching for something to calm me, but there’s no respite to be found in the bowing bookcase of A-level textbooks, the chest of drawers laden with dusty, cheap jewelry and half-empty body sprays. The floor is littered with clothes from the last few days and one wall is lined with boxes, stuff I still haven’t unpacked since I left Chris’s. I feel entombed by it all, by all this stuff. Sweat clings to me in a fine, cold film. Desperate to get out, I decide I’ll run the half mile down to Angel’s Bay—let my confusion toss about with the waves. I’m sure Mum won’t hear me: she’ll be asleep by now.

My feet drop, leaden, out of bed, and as I bend for the jeans I left crumpled on the floor I kick something soft. The bag of carefully laundered clothes meant for Grace tilts and then collapses to the floor. As it does, something thuds. I stare unblinking at the thing on the floor: Grace’s diary. My memory comes back to me in slow, persistent pulses. I picked up the diary, splayed right in front of me. I picked up the diary and, with my hands full and nowhere safe to put it, I dropped it into the bag. I forgot about it, didn’t tell the police. Will I get into trouble? My eyes are fixed on the diary, right there on the floor in front of me, and then I pick it up for the second time today. It shakes in my hand. On the pink cover, Grace has written her name and address. Underneath she’s put PRIVATE in capitals. I go to open it then pause, uneasy, like I’m snooping. But I remember Meg’s eyes again, unseeing but desperate. I picture Grace lying cold and terrified in a disused mine somewhere. No. I run my fingertips over the cover. Grace would understand me reading her diary, she’d know I was trying to help. It’s what Meg would have wanted.

I stumble back to sit on the edge of the bed. I slowly open the cover and it’s like opening a music box, Grace’s childlike voice taking over in my head, telling me about her small life.