Lily flops down on the sofa next to her and Jess instinctively shifts a few inches to the left.

“Are you OK, Jess? Look, I know how hard this is—especially with Mum being how she is right now—but things will get easier, I promise.”

Lily’s voice sounds different, as though she is trying on grown-up reassurance for size and discovering that it doesn’t quite fit.

“Jess, please talk to me. I know how you feel. We’re all grieving. We’re all going through the same thing. I know it’s worse for you because you two were so close, but you might feel better if you talk about it.”

Jess does not know what it is that finally provokes her to ask the question that has been burning her tongue for eighteen days, but suddenly there it is between them before she has a chance to stop it.

“What happened in Zoe’s bedroom that day?” Her voice sounds bolder than she had imagined it would.

“What day? What are you talking about?”

“The day Zoe died.”

Panic skitters across Lily’s face like marbles across cobblestones. “What do you mean, what happened? You know what happened.”

There is such force in Lily’s response that Jess’s confidence begins to falter. But the look on Lily’s face—the same expression she’d worn as she’d barricaded herself in front of Zoe’s bedroom door—gives her the courage to continue. “No, I don’t. And I want to know.”

In the few hesitant seconds of silence, something more than fear or panic flares in Lily’s eyes. There is guilt. And it is all the confirmation Jess needs.

Lily gets up from the sofa and storms toward the door, her voice trailing behind her. “You’re being completely impossible, Jess. You’re making everything harder for everyone. Just stop asking questions, OK? Just stop it.”

Lily charges out of the room and there is a part of Jess that wants to run after her, challenge her, finish a conversation that has only just begun. But when she thinks about following Lily, when she thinks about saying what is really on her mind, her determination flounders. The accusation is so big and frightening, Jess can still not imagine saying it out loud. To say it aloud would be to give it a permanence she is not yet ready to accept.

Instead, she turns back to Blue Peter, to stories of a Russian world far enough away from her own to distract her from truths she does not know how to manage.

Almost exactly three months later, with the secret still burning in her chest, Jess’s netball practice is canceled and she decides—on a whim she will never fully understand—to take herself home to an empty house. She plans to retrieve the spare front door key from the flowerpot in the garden shed and let herself in, to spend the next hour at home alone with a hot chocolate, Oreos, and Grange Hill. And it is there that she discovers her dad swinging from a beam at the top of the stairs, the cord of her mum’s navy blue dressing gown knotted unambiguously around his neck.