‘My phone charger. Oh, it’s still plugged in.’ His eyes settle on Yvonne. ‘How are you holding up?’ he whispers. It seems so genuine, but he’s the one, the only one here who knows the truth about her and Lewis. What must he think?

‘I’m okay.’

He squeezes her shoulder and says, ‘Be strong, okay.’ Then pulls the plug and leaves the kitchen.

Julie slides the door shut behind him. ‘I don’t want Kiama seeing us crying.’

The two women sit at the table, look at the mountain of grated cheese and laugh.

‘How many more people are you expecting?’ Yvonne asks.

‘Not enough to eat all this. I’ll take it up the church later, there’s always someone in need of food.’

‘I guess so,’ Yvonne says as she eats a pinch of cheese. ‘Kiama seems so vacant today, so quiet. How has he been?’

‘Tired. But then he doesn’t want to sleep at night. We put him in the room and he keeps getting back up. I’ve been told that’s normal.’

‘And physically? His feet?’

In Kenya, Yvonne had overheard the police tell Neil and Cynthia how Kiama had survived ‘without a scratch’, as if he was spared, some miracle, but it wasn’t true. His bare feet were ripped raw from the broken glass he ran across in the car park. But it’s the mental trauma which worries her, how does an eight-year-old recover from seeing what he did?

‘The scars are going down well,’ Julie says, ‘it’s a hard area to heal, especially when you’re walking on it all the time. Lewis is a bit of a mess though.’

‘Lewis?’ Yvonne’s head shoots up, surprised to hear his name. ‘Because of Emma?’

‘No, because of Kiama, of how close he came. It’s been a wake-up call. I don’t think he’ll ever let Kiama out of his sight again, which is not a good way for a boy to grow up.’

‘I’ve hardly spoken to him,’ Yvonne says. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘You don’t need to say anything. Just be here.’

Yvonne sits on the sofa as the music gets louder and the talk gets further and further away from Emma. Of course people are sad, but most of those in the room today only knew Emma as Kiama’s mum, or as Lewis’s demanding baby mother. So this send-off is really more about showing solidarity with Kiama than it is about mourning Emma.

It hurts Yvonne that she wasn’t at the ceremony Cynthia and Neil held in Kenya, but she couldn’t face staying on there, to spend any more time in that house with their silent sorrow.

Yvonne walks out to the hall to get away from the noise and finds Kiama, sitting on the steps with a pair of orange Converse in his hands. ‘New shoes?’ she says. ‘They’re so bright.’