After Amy walked out, I lie on the sofa and watch Bethany in old episodes of The Show, scrutinizing her face for a sign of the abuse she was dealing with, trying to read the lies in her eyes. The sitting room grows bright with light: the sky is washed like a watercolour after today’s deluge. I shiver; my clothes are still damp from being caught in the shower on the way to my flat. Something sharp sticks into my butt. I try and sit up, but it digs in further. I slide onto the floor, put my hand in the back pocket of my jeans. I pull out two small, misshapen objects. One is the piece of plastic I found on the beach where Bethany was attacked, the other is the tooth someone had placed on my windowsill in the Italian holiday house.

I sit for a moment, weighing them in my palm, like Anubis. Definitely heavier than a feather. Somebody is going straight to hell. I hang my head between my knees, hoping to quell the nausea. I could leave it alone. After all, no one believes me. Even Bethany is telling me to drop it.

What would Maddison say I should do? I shake my talismans together, like dice, and put them back in my pocket. I force myself to get up, and I make a strong black coffee. In the cupboard there’s an old bottle of apple brandy that Tony, one of Dad’s neighbours, brewed. I wonder how long it’s been here, in this flat. I wonder if Dad drank it on his own or with… I take a slug and feel the sharp sweetness sing through my veins, and then the caffeine jolts my heart.

I realize, as I take another sip, that when Ruby-May died, something in me died too. I lost the man who’d held that baby in his arms and thought he knew what life was all about; I lost the man I could have been. I drink more brandy and it tastes like something rotten, from the bottom of the orchard in our garden.

Ruby-May is running through the thick grass, long blonde hair catching in the hands of the apple trees; she’s laughing. She startles a magpie; it arrows into the sky, the sun shines through its outstretched wings. Ruby-May holds out a bunch of tiny purple flowers in her small fist. Her fingers smell of spearmint. She opens her mouth and green water pours out; skeins of pond weed are tangled in her baby teeth.

It’s now or never, I tell myself. I pour the rest of that rancid brandy down the sink.