As I scroll through the site, I do everything I can to read the words properly, not to let my mind pick and choose, but it’s as though my reason has no balance any more. From anywhere, everywhere, random words and phrases leap out at me. Word-finding difficulties, issues with coordination and speech, information-processing problems, frustration and anger. It’s all in a jumble, no organization to it at all. I am not checking properly what might apply and what couldn’t possibly. It’s as though my anxiety acts as a magnet, drawing every frightening idea to it, and I haven’t got the ability to filter it any more and I’ve no longer got the strength to push it away.

One recollection after another leaps into my brain, again and again the monster bites. The maths problems. He couldn’t do the maths problems. And he couldn’t find his words the other morning. And these tantrums, growing worse and worse, plus how many other mental, emotional signs have I missed?

I feel like crying. I feel so lost, so confused. I am an intelligent woman, a professional, thirty-one years old, but I can’t tell which way up my world stands. I try to tell myself, They don’t add up. What you’ve been noticing, what you’ve been seeing, it doesn’t fit with how signs would present. I repeat it, over and over to myself, but the words are like water, they just run away from me, slipping and disappearing through the holes in my reason. There is nothing here I can hold onto. Nothing feels solid any more in my head. I try to focus on nothing but my breaths, I try distraction, Mindfulness, counting in sevens, anything that can steady my mind.

But the voice in my head only repeats: It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.

When Charlie wakes that evening, around nine, I give him another dose of Calpol and tuck him into his own bed. Miraculously, he sleeps through the night, but it’s another night when I don’t get a wink. My creased bed sheets need changing – I haven’t done it, even though it’s written on my list in the kitchen – and the mattress feels as hard as a rock. Whichever way I lie there’s a bone that sticks out: the back of my pelvis if I face the ceiling; my hipbone if I lie on my side. When I try to curl up, the edges of my kneecaps bruise together. I don’t seem to have any cushioning any more. I cannot stop thinking about Charlie. And I can’t stop reeling either from the truth about Sarah’s parents. It feels as though pieces of reality have fallen out of the world, and taken a whole piece of my own mind with them.