The apology hurt her throat, but not because she resented it. It hurt because it was the hardest thing she’d ever had to admit. She’d done this. She was just as responsible for them losing Jamie. She’d been determined to shoulder the burden herself, trying to find a way to solve Claude’s riddles so that she could stay with Ellie and the Wolfsons, so that she wouldn’t have to be alone, and she’d ended up more alone than ever.

‘I feel so stupid, I just –’ Lottie choked on the words but persisted, pushing through her discomfort, because this wasn’t about her feelings right now. ‘I’m just overwhelmed, and it’s making me do stupid things that keep hurting people. I’m sorry.’

Binah grabbed Lottie’s pink cheeks in her warm hands, forcing her to face her. Even though Binah was no more than five feet tall, in that moment Lottie felt like her head was the whole world, and Binah was a god holding it in her benevolent hands.

‘Thank you for the apology, Lottie,’ she said. ‘But I want you to know that you can and should open up to me. You are your own person, with your own feelings, who exists outside all this and it’s selfish to keep your friends locked out. We worry about you too.’ She waited for Lottie to acknowledge she was taking this all in. ‘Now tell me what’s going on.’

The idea of offloading anything to anyone else felt like a criminal act, and yet here was Binah telling her it was more selfish to keep it bottled up. Binah’s eyes weren’t pleading or angry; Binah was looking at her with nothing but love.

Lottie relented, the acknowledgement painful and strange. ‘It’s not just Jamie. I had a fight with Ellie before he went missing. A bad one, and she won’t talk about it, or anything. It’s like she’s hiding something from me. I know she’s hiding something from me.’ She didn’t realize she was crying until she felt Binah’s thumbs wiping the salt away from her cheeks. It felt like all she was doing was crying recently.

‘It’s OK,’ Binah said. ‘It’s OK that you’re sad about this. You’re allowed to be.’