I stuck my head in the kitchen, where she was painting the last of the cupboards. There were yellow splatters on her clothes, her hands, even on her dark hair, which was exactly like mine apart from the fact that hers was cut below her chin in a pretty bob and mine was longer and almost always up in a ponytail. I would have liked a bob, too, but I knew that if I didn’t have my hair pulled away from my face and hands, I would never stop fidgeting with it, tucking it behind my ears, twirling it around a finger, all that. I already bit my fingernails every time I saw even a little of the white end-part grow back, so I really didn’t need another distracting bad habit.

“You look like lemon pie,” I informed my mother, giggling. I snatched her phone off the counter and took a photo of her.

“Horrid thing,” she said affectionately. “You picked this color.”

“It’s nice on the cupboards, but pretty weird on a human.”

With a look in her eye I could only describe as evil, she flicked the wide paintbrush in my direction. I squealed as splotches of cold yellow paint sprayed my cheek and shoulder.

“You’re right,” she said, grinning, “it does look pretty weird on a human.”

She was the actual worst. I grinned back.

“So,” she went on, tossing me a tea towel to dab the paint off my face, “why are you back so early?”

“Oh, I couldn’t remember if I’d locked the front door and I was pretty sure you’d been eaten by a goose, so I came back to check.”

It was the truth, but I said it cheerfully, like it was silly and funny. Mum knew about the anxiousness, the obsessions, the need to do something. She was always nice about it and never made me feel bad, not even that time last year when I woke her at four in the morning by leaning over her to make sure she was still breathing. She just said, “Well, I used to do it to you when you were a baby, so I guess this is payback,” and let me sleep in her bed for the rest of the night.

But I didn’t think Mum knew just how bad it was for me. I had never told her, so how could she? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I just didn’t want to worry her.

And I guess maybe I also didn’t want to tell her because that would make this A Big Deal. A giant Something. I didn’t want it to be Something. I wanted it to be Nothing, irrelevant, unimportant. I wanted it to be a Nothing that didn’t disrupt my life, or make me unhappy, or turn me into someone I didn’t even know anymore. A Nothing so unimportant, it would go away very soon, and I’d get the sunshiny version of me back.

Now, narrowing her eyes at me, Mum ignored my nonsense about geese and cut right to the important part: “You were so worried about whether you’d locked the front door that you left your friends early and came all the way back?”