Chloe pushes her sandwich aside, reaches for her coffee instead. ‘You have to understand how much I believed in Sarah. How much I believed – full stop. She made me think there was such a thing as a happy home, a happy family. I suppose I dreamed that, one day, I’d be invited along. I would get to do all of those things too. That was so much of what got me through. And in the beginning, I had no reason to doubt her. I’d read books, I’d watched TV shows. I knew there were kids who had all of those things. And, like I said, I wanted to believe her. But the more time I spent with her, the more I started to notice … Little things. Her stories got more exaggerated over time. And there were little errors she sometimes made. I made the mistake, once, of catching her out. She said she was going on holiday to Spain, but I bumped into her at the bus stop when she was meant to be away. She yelled at me then. She was furious. I quickly learned not to do that again. And she could be so quick to explain things away. So I noticed it, but I just … ignored it. I didn’t want to look at what was really going on.’

Chloe pauses, takes a breath. She has said so much all at once. I take a sip of tea, the liquid scorching my mouth. ‘And what was that?’

‘I just … there was something really wrong with her, I think.’ Chloe looks down and shakes her head. ‘She was lying, Jennifer. All the time. This whole life she was supposedly living. The parents, the holidays, the horse. She’d made them all up. She was always pretending. And I went along with it. I just let her lie, until …’

The tea and orange juice curdle on the floor of my stomach. ‘Until, what?’

‘Until one lunchtime when I couldn’t find her. We had a place we usually hung out, outside. But that day, we’d had another falling out and she’d sneaked off to the art room. Our relationship was sort of … unravelling by then.’

I don’t say anything. I don’t want to interrupt.

Chloe coughs into her hand. ‘Someone told me where she had gone, so I went looking. I still didn’t have … anyone else to hang out with. When I got to the art room, I could hear voices. There was a group of popular girls who often hung out in there.’

Above us, there’s an announcement over the airport Tannoy. The flight to Dubai. Chloe’s flight. I can feel the pull of it, pulling her away from me. I want to put my hand around her arm, hold her back until she gets to the end.

‘Voices?’ I prompt.