She can’t be in the house. She walks into town but it’s too early for the shops to be open and then it starts to rain, heavy and dull. Yesterday’s light, high skies have closed right down, thick cloud and raw, damp air. It is the first of May. Mayday, she thinks. She remembers from Guides that you have to say it three times in a row. Mayday mayday. She goes back. Two of her housemates are up, both hungover, smoking in the kitchen. She makes a cup of tea, sits with them a bit. Talks; hears herself talk. Laughs. Tells them about the Sunday in Carnlough, the Holy Communion. They all laugh about it. She goes up to her room. At 11.11 she takes the second lot of pills: all four of them. They’re chalky and bitter under her tongue. At 11.21 they’ve hardly dissolved at all. Her jaw aches with the effort of holding her mouth and tongue still. She gives it until 11.25, watching the minutes pass on her phone. Then 11.30. That has to be enough. She swallows what remains of them down with some water from her bottle. She can’t go out again now. It is likely to start working within two hours but may take up to five, or in some cases even longer. She opens her laptop and goes to the website, checks to see if there’s anything she’s missed. Then deletes her browsing history again: clear history, reset top sites, remove all website data.

She waits for the guilt to start, the regret, but it doesn’t. What does she feel? She tests out emotions. Scared, yes. Definitely scared. She’s deleted her browsing history seventeen, eighteen times. But they have ways of finding these 20things out, and somewhere, etched onto the internet, is her name, her address, her PayPal account: what she did. When, where and how. She, or anyone who helps her, could be jailed for life. So, scared. What else does she feel? Sadness. She wants to have babies one day. She wants to see the blue line and feel giddy with excitement, check its weekly growth. She wants to want it. But not like this. The other thing she feels, to her surprise, is relief. An overwhelming, incredible sense of relief: that she is doing the right thing.