‘Such a long way, you must be exhausted after your journey. How long was the plane ride? Did you come from the airport?’ The questions rain down.

‘No, I arrived late last night.’ The first lie of many. ‘I stayed in a hotel close to Heathrow.’

‘Still, you must be tired.’ Her mum peers at her, looking for evidence of a long-haul flight. Beth doesn’t need to worry – she’s certain that she looks much worse than thirteen hours on a plane could achieve – but she still squirms under her mum’s gaze.

‘Are you going to invite me in?’ she asks finally, smiling warmly, trying to break her mum’s stare.

‘Of course! Silly me. You must be hungry, thirsty.’

Beth waits for her to stand back from the doorway, and then steps inside. But the hallway is narrower than she remembers, and her mum is too close now. She’ll want a hug, Beth realises, of course she will after ten years apart, but Beth can’t allow that. She’s already teetering on the edge, and her mum’s touch will be like kryptonite. She needs to create more space, and knows the front room is just behind her. She reaches back for the door handle. It feels sticky under her grasp and a wave of nausea rises up, but she swallows it back down and manages to push the handle down.

Beth blinks. She’d forgotten about the large family photo above the fireplace. The only non-essential item she ever witnessed her parents buy. It’s of the four of them, smartly dressed, heads together and smiling. Before Beth stopped being able to handle such togetherness. Before Eddie died. It’s been almost two decades since her brother lived in this house, but his ghost is here in other ways too. The Star Wars VHS tapes that Beth can just about see in the open drawer under the TV, the faint sick and bloodstains in the carpet, the splinters in the wooden doors and the deep cracks on her mum’s face.

She feels an intense urge to turn and run.

She was 15 when she first saw Eddie vomit on the floor. Her mum told her it was a stomach bug, but Beth knew that was a lie, her maternal instinct to protect them both at play. Because it’s impossible to hide a secret like drug addiction when you share a bedroom. She remembers watching her mum scrub at the carpet with an old sponge, then squeeze the mix of sick and soapy water into a bucket. There was a small tear in her mum’s rubber gloves, and Beth remembers imagining the remnants of Eddie’s sick crawling inside and staining her mum’s fingers.

It was around then when she started washing her hands in scalding water, cleaning her few precious things so ferociously that she ruined most of them.