The Pattersons have a curse. But I will not let it take me, will not succumb like my mother, will not let it wash over me and drown everything like she did, to leave me and my sister to flounder while she sank away.

As I pour a coffee, I watch Chris stack pancakes on a plate and drizzle some maple syrup over them. He has that spring in his step he normally reserves for special occasions and he puts the pancakes down in front of me with a practiced flourish.

“Ta-da!” he says. “Pancakes for my beautiful wife!” He kisses my cheek and grins at me. The grin grows wider as he pulls some napkins from a drawer and unfurls one into my lap. It is a brilliant electric blue. I watch him as I take a mouthful. It is like glass in my mouth. He watches me back, a flicker of something at the corner of his mouth. He is goading me. Again.

“Are you OK, Meggie?” His voice drips with concern. “Something wrong with the pancakes? You’ve hardly touched them.”

The pile in front of me seems to shimmer in the weak sunlight coming through the window. The glass in my mouth dissolves into ash; am I imagining the taste of almond on my tongue?

“I’ll eat them if you don’t want them,” he says, hovering his fork over my plate. I push them toward him. “Worried about seeing your mum?”

No, of course not, I want to scream at him. Why would I possibly be worried about seeing Mum? Who doesn’t have any idea who I am and who calls me Leah every single time I can face visiting her in that place? Instead I smile and whisper, “A little.”

“I’ll be with you, Meggie. We’ve got this. Together.”

Mum lives just outside of the village of Wotton, near Dorking. The house is gorgeous, with the North Downs behind it, large grounds full of fruit trees and hidden nooks of shade, perfect for summer reading. It would be idyllic: except for the other residents and the truth of why they live there. Sometimes I can imagine everything is fine, that we are just meeting up for a pot of tea in the grounds of an old stately home, like some of my friends do with their mothers, a lovely day out somewhere special. But most of the time our visits to the Jonas Institute are punctuated by the screaming of the woman in the next room, normally set off by the man who likes to rap on her window just to scare her, or by the man who likes to strip naked and run around the grounds irrespective of the weather until he is caught and bundled back into the warmth by the harried-looking staff.

“What’s the racket, Leah?” Mum will ask me, confusing me with my sister. Sometimes I just go with it, let her think that I’m Leah and reminisce with her about the past. I wonder if Leah does the same when she visits? If she visits at all.