She takes a long gulp and opens the website. She clicks the ‘Between the Commons’ section and it’s still the first post that comes up. Before she can stop herself, Kat runs her fingers over the woman’s image on the screen. The sky behind is indigo blue and her chocolate brown hair is glistening under an out-of-shot sun. It’s definitely her. Everything about her is familiar: the high cheekbones, huge brown eyes and tanned skin. Eighteen years have left their mark of course, but in some ways, Beth looks younger than her teenage self. Her hair is bobbed now, and her skin seems even smoother, if that’s possible. Kat runs her hand over her own cheeks and feels the lumps and bumps of eczema scars. Her skin problems were so intertwined with her plummeting mental health back then that she’s come to think of them as war wounds. Is she really contemplating opening them back up?

But she’s a different person now. Physically, the wobbly flesh has gone, along with the eczema, watery grey eyes and lank, dark blonde hair. And she’s stronger on the inside too, more stable. She can do this.

With a sigh, Kat forces herself to look away from the photo and focus on the post underneath it. It’s long, five paragraphs, and reads more like a short story than an overview of the event. The author, Saskia Tomes, describes herself as Beth’s closest friend. Kat wonders exactly how close they are. There’s a tiny picture of Saskia next to her name, but she’s mostly hidden behind a big glass of some orange cocktail and Kat can’t see her features. She clicks on her name and scrolls through her activity, then onto her other social media accounts. Saskia Tomes is clearly a keyboard warrior, fighting for the vulnerable from the safety of her million-pound home.

Kat gets distracted for a while, clicking from one link to another until she has twenty-odd tabs open on her laptop. When she’s satisfied that she knows enough about the woman who claims to be Beth’s closest friend, she returns to the original post.

Sally had gone into lots of detail when she relayed the incident at work yesterday, so Kat doesn’t learn anything new, but reading the words takes her to the scene, and she shudders as she wonders how Beth must have felt in the moment. Kat reads all the comments underneath the post too. The admirers and the critics, the fanatics, and the downright arseholes.