You’re having a breakdown, that wise person above me says. A total breakdown. I can see it happening to myself, quite clearly.

I keep hitting Alastair, again and again. All the confusion and horror of these last few weeks has come bulging out of me. I have become violent, enraged, hysterical, helpless.

‘How could you?’ I’m shouting at him. ‘How could you? How dare you take him off somewhere like that, my son! You had no right, you had no right!’

‘I’m sorry!’ Alastair is trying to say. ‘I sent you a text! Charlie couldn’t find his key. We came here to keep warm. Charlie said he comes to this park all the time. We knew you were coming, and I sent you a text!’

He’s repeating himself, in the face of my madness.

‘I thought we were friends,’ Alastair is saying. ‘I thought we trusted each other. I was glad that you asked for my help!’

My arm is too weak to keep fighting and swinging. My bag drops like a leaden weight to my side. There’s the tiniest, tiniest moment where it can all be so different. If Alastair would only step forwards right then, wrap his arms around me, hold me tight until I know that I’m safe. But I have scared him too much, how can he approach me? So instead I grab Charlie’s arm and then we are running, me and Charlie, away from this man that I’ve become so terrified of, and my head feels as though it can’t contain what’s inside it any more; so many questions and falsehoods and mirages, each one of them shredding another part of me into nothing. We run across the cold, muddy grass, out of the play park, Charlie stumbling and crying beside me, and I can feel myself leaving that wise version behind me, floating loose above me, and I think to myself, if you run out of these gates like this right now, there might be no way you will ever get her back.

When we get home, I give Charlie Calpol again. He cries and shouts at me – he doesn’t want it, he hates it – until in the end I have to half-force it through his lips, hand over his mouth to make sure he swallows. I don’t know how else to manage him or myself.

I put him to bed, weak with relief when he falls asleep. I plug my phone in to charge and drag open my laptop. I type everything I can think of into the Internet search bar. What happened to Sarah’s loving parents? If they are dead, then how did they die? It feels as if this piece is the answer to everything. The thing that will bring my sanity back. The woman at the local authority, the coroner, they never told me this. Maybe they didn’t even know.