‘Call yourself a farmer’s daughter,’ her father had teased when she had complained about the bird and she had thought to herself, ‘Well, no, actually. I don’t call myself a farmer’s daughter – not to anyone that matters, anyway.’ But of course, she hadn’t said this to him. Whilst Pip didn’t want all and sundry knowing about her humble origins, the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt her father.

And now it was Saturday morning and the weekend was spread out in front of her like a fresh page in a notebook. Or a diary. The diary! In all the calamity of Dominic’s unexpected visit and its aftermath, she had totally forgotten about the diary. She’d had a plan for her weekend that had been temporarily blindsided. But now Dominic was gone – in all senses of the word – and so what better way of distracting herself from unwelcome thoughts about him than returning to Plan A and losing herself in someone else’s life for a while?

She flicked the duvet back and slipped her feet out of bed. She would sneak downstairs, retrieve the diary and bring it back to her room. But as soon as she opened her bedroom door, she could hear her mother’s voice calling out to her.

‘Is that you, Pip?’

Pip felt the familiar irritation grow. It was so claustrophobic. She couldn’t even breathe here without somebody noticing and wanting to make sure that she was doing it properly.

The voice was coming from the bathroom, where the door stood wide open. Her family had never had much of an issue with privacy, something that hadn’t worried Pip when she’d lived there and didn’t know any different, but it now felt overfamiliar.

‘I brought a plastic bag back with me last night. Do you know where it went?’ she asked, heading for the stairs.

‘With an old book in it? I put it in the dresser. I didn’t want Dom . . .’ Her mother stopped mid-sentence as she emerged from the bathroom, a threadbare towel barely covering her torso and her sandy-coloured hair hanging in dripping tails around her face. ‘I didn’t want the place looking untidy,’ she continued, her ruddy cheeks a shade pinker than usual.

‘It’s okay, Mum,’ Pip replied reassuringly. ‘I’ll be all right. Honestly. And it’s probably for the best. We’d been drifting for a while, and what with me being stuck here . . .’ She paused, changed direction. ‘Please don’t worry about me. I’m not about to fall apart or anything.’

The irony of this sentence almost made her laugh.

‘Good,’ replied her mother, although her expression was sceptical, as if she didn’t really believe what Pip had said. Pip wasn’t entirely sure she believed it, either. Could she really dismiss Dominic walking out on her quite so lightly? But then again, this wasn’t really her, was it? This was the shell of her, but her vital parts – her heart, her soul, the essence of who she was – had been placed in frozen suspension by the accident, leaving her incapable of normal responses.