What creeps across every inch of her skin—before the shock hits her brain, before the adrenaline floods her bloodstream, before the first screams erupt from her throat—is a white-hot fury like nothing she has ever experienced before. As she stands in the hallway of the only home she has ever known, looking up at her dad’s body suspended from a makeshift noose, Jess experiences a febrile certainty that this is all Lily’s fault.

As her first screams emerge, a single thought pounds inside Jess’s head: Lily now has blood on her hands for the death of not one person but two.

For the next twenty-eight years, people will assume that the worst fate ever to befall Jess is to have discovered her father’s body at the top of the stairs. Jess will choose never to contradict them. She will tell no one the truth. She will never confess that in fact the worst thing that has ever happened to her is not her father taking his own life, but Lily taking Zoe’s. She will never explain to anyone that, over the course of a single summer, she lost her entire family: the deaths of her twin sister and her dad; her older sister never to be trusted again; her mum forever at arm’s length, Jess’s determination to shield her from the truth creating an impenetrable barrier of tension and mistrust between them.

Zoe’s death becomes, over the years, an all-consuming absence. It is an absence that leaves Jess feeling as though someone has sliced away a piece of her heart that she knows will never be returned and can never be replaced. And beyond Zoe’s absence are the concentric circles of loss that ripple out from that kernel of grief: the adults Jess no longer trusts for their failure to prevent so heinous a crime; the friends and boyfriends she rejects for fear that intimacy may lead to disclosure; the family from whom she is estranged. It is knowledge that isolates Jess from the rest of the world, like a patient in quarantine who fears infecting others with the truth.

At times the loneliness devours her. There are moments when she has a burning need to confide in someone—therapists, telephone helplines, the police—but each time her courage fails her. She is too fearful of the evil spirits that may emerge if she opens that Pandora’s box. Every time she imagines it, all she can picture is the horror on her mum’s face: the shock, the pain, and the renewed grief.

Instead, Jess remains silent, conscious of her own impotence, the secret slowly strangling her every day of her life.

Chapter 47

Jess

A waiter brushed past Jess and she looked around the restaurant, the white noise of diners’ conversations slowly filtering into her ears as though someone was turning up the volume and pulling her back into the present.

“Please sit down, both of you. Just for five minutes, that’s all I’m asking.”

There was desperation in her mum’s voice and Jess didn’t know whether to resent it or give in to it.