Nic saw it then, too. Steve’s face was exactly like Dad’s face in the wedding photo Mum kept in the top drawer of her bedside table. It was the only photo of Dad in the house. She was sure. She had looked and looked. And even though going into Mum’s room when she wasn’t home was forbidden, she had to, because if she didn’t look at the photo regularly she would forget what Dad looked like and then he might turn up at the school gate one day and she would walk right past him! He might start following her down the street and she’d turn and scream at him to piss off, like she’d been taught to do if a strange man bothered her.

Fat lot of good all her sneaky looking had done. She hadn’t recognised Dad’s face even when it was sitting right across from her at family dinners for months. The good thing, though, was that now she knew the faces matched she didn’t need to sneak into Mum’s room to remind herself. She only needed to look and look and look at her half-brother. Her brother. She gorged herself on his face the way he gorged himself on Mum’s spag bol. A few times he asked her what she was gawping at and she said the truth, that she was gawping at his face. He told her she was a weird kid but he said it in a voice that meant he loved her.

Her intimate knowledge of Steve’s face meant she was the first to know something was wrong. Long before Mum noticed money missing from her purse, long before the TV and video player disappeared and they didn’t hear from Steve for weeks, before Michelle came home and found him on the floor and when she woke him he sicked up on her and called her the worst names, long before Mum changed the locks, told him she could help him find a rehab place but she couldn’t let him put her girls at risk any longer. Long before all that, before his skin turned grey and his eyes yellow, Nic knew something was wrong because his face went from being an open door to a closed one. She hadn’t known you could do that, become private from the inside out.