“Do you need a drink?”

“Some juice, please,” I reply.

Shelley sticks her head out of the door. I hear her ask the social worker to buy me some juice from the newsagent’s across the road.

“What we talk about here is just between you and me,” Shelley says. “I don’t tell the police. I don’t work for the police. I just work for you.”

I look at her.

“Do you believe me, Charlene?” Shelley asks.

I want to.

“I need to make sure that whatever happens today is the best thing for you,” she adds.

I look away from her. Nothing can be “best”.

Then Shelley starts to ask me questions. They’re not about Blake – not at first. She asks me where I’m living and what it’s like. She asks me if I see my family and my mouth runs away before I can stop it, telling her about Mum and Aunty Jasmine and Kandi. I say so much about Kandi. It’s like I stored her up inside me, but she’s been pushing at the doors, waiting to burst out.

It’s weird. The more I talk about Kandi, the brighter she becomes in my head. She stops fading. I talk even more – about how big Kandi was when she was a baby and how she was born with so much hair I could plait it from when she was two months old. How I used to mash avocado and banana together and feed her. How Kandi saw some kids’ programme with dinosaurs and then that was it. She was obsessed with them.

Shelley puts down her pen. “She means everything to you.”

It isn’t a question. I don’t need to answer. That’s good, because no matter how hard I breathe in, I can’t stop the crying. I don’t make no noise. It’s just tears mixed in with my make-up. Shelley hands me the box of tissues and says I can take as long as I like.

When I calm down, I tell Shelley how I knitted some daisies for Mum and they were left in the hospital. Aunty Jasmine found them and laid them on Mum’s coffin at the church. After the service, Kandi’s dad said he was taking the knitted daisies home with him. I thought he was taking me too.

Shelley sits back and looks at me.

She says, “Charlene, I’m so sorry that this happened to you.”

“You’re sorry?” I say.

“I am, Charlene. Very sorry.”

I sit back too. Something unwinds inside me, twists out of me. I breathe in and it doesn’t hurt.

“Thank you,” I say. It’s a whisper.

“Don’t give up, Charlene,” Shelley tells me. “I’m by your side. We will fight this together.”