I will give it another week in that school, and then I’m making up my mind once and for all. Jack’s right – life’s way too short for feeling this sickness in the pit of my stomach every Sunday evening and I don’t need to keep going through this hell.

‘Are you sure there’s nothing else bothering you?’ he asks me as he turns the key in the front door. ‘You would tell me if there was, wouldn’t you Charlotte?’

‘Of course, I would,’ I tell him honestly. ‘It’s just the job. I’ll give it one more week and we can talk about it then.’

It’s just the job.

Isn’t it? Yes, of course it is, I convince myself, but deep in my heart I’ve an awful inkling that things mightn’t be as secure in my life as they seem on the outside. I don’t like this feeling at all. It’s like a gut-wrenching anxiety that when things seem too good to be true, they probably are.

Is it Matthew? Has something happened to him in Galway? Or Emily? I hope it’s not Mam or Dad – or what if something happened to Jack? I feel like a beautiful bird, gliding along a beautiful lake but beneath it I’m paddling for all I’m worth and no one can see it. It’s like a fear in the pit of my stomach, like I’m waiting for all I have to go belly up just like my life did on the day of Matthew’s accident. It’s like I’m preparing myself for the next trauma, whatever that may be.

I know my life is perfect to the outside world, yet my mood is slipping and I don’t know why.

It’s probably the hangover kicking in again, I repeat in my head like a mantra. Things will be easier in the morning.

Chapter Fourteen

June 2018

‘Mrs Malone? A chat please in my office?’

My class of twenty-five eight-year-olds are engrossed in ‘library time’ and I’m using the silence to catch up on marking some homework when the school principal, Miss Jean Brady, interrupts with a sentence that rises in pitch with every word, and a smile that tells me she’s about to lynch me for something I’ve done wrong again in her prissy, stuck-up prison – I mean, ‘school for rich kids’.

I nod to Paula, my classroom assistant, who has gone fifty shades of white at the very sight of our very own version of Maleficent and mouths to me ‘Good luck.’