Jess heard her mum attempt to stifle a cough. She lay completely still, hardly daring to breathe, remembering all those childhood nights curled up alone in bed. All those nights she had listened to her mum sobbing in the bedroom across the landing. All those nights she had heard hissed conversations from the floors below. She remembered sitting at the top of the stairs, hearing Lily’s voice from behind closed doors, knowing she should not have been eavesdropping but being unable to tear herself away as she listened to her sister’s pleading: Please, Dad. Please stop it. You have to. Please.

Light glared into the room from the gap between the wall and the curtains, and Jess pulled the duvet high over her head, her breath circulating hot and damp in the confined space, but still the images kept coming. She scrunched her eyes until her forehead ached, but instead of forcing the memories from her mind, it sharpened their focus until she was back in her childhood home on the day it had happened.

Chapter 16

September 1988

Jess opens the shed door and peers around in the darkness, her eyes accustoming to the gloom. She steps inside, wary of spiders and their webs, but decides she would rather not see them even if they are there. Reaching toward the flowerpot on the middle shelf, she pulls it toward her and hears the key rattle before her fingers find it. She grabs it and backs out of the door, heads across the garden and through the side gate, around to the front of the house.

When her after-school netball practice had been canceled, it had crossed Jess’s mind that her mum would expect her to find Lily, tell her that she was finishing early and wait until her sister was free to bring her home. But as she had hovered at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the fifth-form classrooms, something had stopped her. She had thought perhaps it had been her newness at secondary school that had made her fearful of entering the fifth-formers’ territory: just two weeks since her first day, her August birthday making her one of the youngest pupils in a thousand-strong school. But she had known, deep down, that it was really because she did not want to be at home alone with Lily.

Throughout the summer holidays, Jess had craved an escape from the tears, the tension, the hushed conversations behind closed doors. For months she has not accepted invitations to friends’ houses in case they look at her in the way they had at the end of last term when everyone found out what had happened: those looks of curiosity, pity, sympathy, and horror that had made her want to shout into their faces: It’s not my fault. I didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t know how to stop it. She has not wanted to invite friends home in case they discover the truth about how her family are living now: her mum’s tear-stained cheeks emerging only rarely from under the duvet in the spare bedroom; her dad bookending his ever-lengthening days at the office with a quiet restlessness, as though he cannot sit still but does not know where he wants to go; Lily disappearing before Jess is up, often staying out all day as though the house is contaminated and she fears infection, although Jess has no idea where her sister goes, whether she sees anyone, what she does.