I nodded and grabbed her hand. The pain was bad, but not bad enough to stop me. I glanced behind me, saw nothing but trees. Emma looked around too.

‘She’s gone,’ Emma said quietly.

I could hear the hope in her voice, almost like she couldn’t believe our luck. For me too, the idea that Mother had gone was too good to be true, and I knew that we had to keep on running until we found someone. If we stopped for too long and she was still around, she might catch up and grab us. I couldn’t – wouldn’t – go back to that place. And Patrick needed help.

‘We need to keep running,’ I said to Emma, ‘OK?’

She nodded bravely and we ran through the ankle-high grass towards the burning sun.

Chapter 28

We ran through the green field into another field and another. The third field was brown and all churned up into one gigantic stretch of dry, hard, rippling soil. Did this mean a tractor had been used on it? Did this mean we were close to making human contact?

My heart leapt and I thought I might die with hope – and fear. What if the person we met was insane too? How many people in the world were like Mother? If she was crazy, there had to be others. I felt my hope sink as a realization set in: we had no choice. We would have to place our trust in the first person – or people – we saw. I knew this and it frightened me badly. But Patrick had been good. Slow to come round, but kind. He had tried to help us, even though he had struggled to believe my story. Would others think I was making it up too? Would they take us back there? Back to that secret house in the middle of nowhere? I shuddered. Just thinking about it made me want to scream.

Emma stumbled on the uneven earth and I held up her wrist, preventing her from falling.

‘Thank you, Polly,’ she said, looking up at me through misty eyes.

‘We’re going to be fine. I promise,’ I said, trying to make my voice calm.

I had to stop thinking the worst.

It seemed like Mother had given up. We had escaped the cottage. We were outside. Free. I wasn’t dying any more – not that I ever had been. I was alive and well and going to find my parents and live happily ever after, like they did in fairy tales. Emma was going to go back to her parents and forget all about this. One day she would look back on it all and it would feel like one really bad nightmare. She was so young that she would forget all about this horrible experience. She wasn’t physically hurt. Mother had never harmed her, except for that bruise on her arm the day she took her from the supermarket.