Could you take an eye out with a diamond? Probably. You could do all sorts of terrible things, and I was beginning to realise that pretty much anything awful you could think of, someone else would have thought of first. And then gone and done it. There was really very little about the real world that made it a good alternative to books, where at least all the horrible things were just invented, and there was a fighting chance that the villains would go down in the end.

But whatever Mum thought was really neither here nor there. I knew there was something close to Ingrid that was bad, something hidden away so that all you could see was the stain it had left. But at the same time, I had no idea what it was.

My instinct was to stay as far away as possible. But I couldn’t figure out a way of avoiding the visit. If I faked sick, Mum would just put it off, and if I refused to go it would just cause a drama until I gave in. Whatever was there to find, I would have to face it. And so, even though I was more scared than I had ever been in my life before, I decided to go.

Mum drove us there from London, which felt like something that wouldn’t happen very often in future; whenever we got into a car with Mark, he seemed to end up taking the wheel. But he’d been away somewhere for work and was going to meet us at Ingrid’s place, so it was down to Mum to get us there.

Actually, the whole trip felt like the end of an era, which was weird because it wasn’t, not yet. There were still several weeks to go before the wedding, so it wasn’t as if we were leaving anyone or anything behind. Still, the mood in the car wasn’t one of anticipation: it was resigned and a bit melancholy and very quiet. An autumn kind of mood, even though it was a glorious summer day.

Mum was too preoccupied to chat. She was busy concentrating on the satnav, which had a nasty habit of taking you down strange turnings if you let it, and didn’t pay proper attention to what was actually in front of you. Ava was sitting in the front next to her, and didn’t say much either. She’d been like that ever since we got back from France. In the past at least she’d always had something to say for herself, even if it was usually annoying. This new Ava gave nothing away at all.

Luckily, the countryside we were driving through was beautiful, and that helped to make up for everything that wasn’t quite so great. Everywhere you looked there was a view you could have painted in watercolours and hung up on the wall. I couldn’t believe that I’d lived so long in places that were jumbles of houses and people and hadn’t known all this was here. It was bizarre that there were such huge areas of land that were just fields or trees, with nobody around at all.