Not Cynthia though. Me. Lying on the floor, dying in her arms.

McCarthy and Walsh kept knocking and eventually broke through the door. There we were on the dirty carpet. Me unconscious, Cynthia calmly rubbing my hair. McCarthy called an ambulance, and a paramedic with a syringe of something called Naloxone saved my life. I need to thank the woman next door. And McCarthy and Walsh. And the paramedic. And I need to see my babies. But God, poor Cora. Trying to clear her father’s name. And Lila. Lila who did nothing at all.

Mark, understandably, wants to know what I was doing there. Why I lied about going to a fictional Dr Kinsella all these years. Who this woman Cynthia is. Why she injected me with a lethal dose of painkillers. It is the longest story in the world, the one I’ve never been able to tell him, but now I’m lying in a hospital bed, and we have all day. I start at the beginning, dismantling the fiction, filling in facts. He is baffled and hurt and can’t understand why I made it all up. Invented a tragedy. A fire. The made-up parents and their made-up deaths. Because it was better, I tell him. Even a tragic fire was better than the truth of my childhood: the mother who didn’t care, the girl whose death I caused. He still doesn’t get it, but Mark was brought up in a safe and happy house. He’s never had to invent anything at all. And now he’s bruised. Betrayed. I understand that. We talk and we talk and we talk. We work out what to tell the kids and what to keep to ourselves. He’s hurt. Curt at times. And sometimes, the way he looks at me, I wonder if he’ll ever really trust me again. But we hold hands even as he struggles to understand. He’s still there for me.

‘They found her burial site,’ he tells me on Saturday. ‘Right where you said, in the garden of the O’Brien house. It looked like a flower bed.’

And although I knew she died that night long ago, it hits me all over again. Even with Cynthia arrested and Lily alive, there is no happy ending. Not for Lila. She was betrayed by everyone around her.

‘Her death is unacceptable,’ I say to Mark through fresh tears. ‘She was a vulnerable, defenceless child.’

‘So were you,’ he says, squeezing my hand. ‘You were ten. You were trying to save her. You have to forgive yourself. It was an accident. A horrible, horrible accident.’

I don’t know if I can forgive myself, but I can accept that Cynthia should never have put me in that position. And maybe that’s a start.

‘She’ll get a proper burial now,’ Mark says.

I nod, remembering Adana’s words. Everyone deserves a grave. A headstone. A cross. That’s when I realize what’s been niggling at me. And now I have the last piece of the puzzle.

I know where Lily is.