When we were fifteen, we lied to a man on holiday in Turkey, convincing him we were eighteen—it was an ill-advised ruse and one he really shouldn’t have believed—and he tattooed a little matching flower on to each of us, obscuring the baby marks forever. No one could tell us apart then. That was the summer before everything started to change. Before Leah began to look at anything that was mine and want it for herself. Until we were sixteen things had been ours: our toys, our clothes, our bedroom with the bunk beds and the weekly fight for who got to take the coveted top one. When Dad left the second time—or was it the third? I don’t quite remember—Mum had swapped rooms with us, taking the smaller one for herself so we could get rid of the bunk beds and have two divans side by side. I bought a curtain and used it to divide the room down the middle.

Nothing was safe from Leah’s sticky fingers: my makeup pillaged, clothes bought with saved-up wages from my Saturday job stolen and ruined, books destroyed. But her greatest pride came in stealing away my friends. And, of course, the occasional boy who looked my way. I had begun to shrink away into her shadow, and she seemed to draw strength from watching me suffer.

“You definitely should talk to her sometime.” Chris has been speaking without me listening for the past ten minutes.

“What?” I reply.

“Jeez, Meggie. Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

We are only five minutes from home; the past forty minutes have shot past without my recollection. Stoke Park appears on our left, home to the County Fair where, last year, Hannah—my best friend, who can be a little ditzy sometimes—had got pissed and ordered a hot tub from a very nice man she had been trying to chat up. Then Burger King and the retail park on the right. Chris and I had once eaten the world’s biggest whippy ice creams there as we debated spending a fortune on a pair of sofas for the living room. Amazingly, a sugar high is almost like being drunk; we’d ended up buying a sideboard and a new kitchen table at the same time.

“Sorry. I was miles away.”

“Which affront to your life were you obsessing on this time?” He sounds tired. Like he’s bored of me talking about the issues with Leah even though he is the one that brought her up again. Did he always do this? Needle me to talk about something and then act like a dick when I did? I’ve noticed it more and more recently.

“I wasn’t obsessing.” I sound like a child. I feel like a child. I wish I could have a tantrum and scream and shout and generally just make a fucking scene. How cathartic that would be. But I don’t. Because… well, adults don’t get that opportunity, do we?

“You need to let things go and move on. She is your sister, after all.”