‘Did you think that would be best for her?’ the lady asks. ‘Not to tell her anything at all?’ She is asking Daddy, but both Mum and Daddy answer.

‘No,’ says Mum, just as Daddy says, ‘Yes.’

There’s a pause then, in which all Prin can really hear is the squeak of her felt-tip pen. She puts that pen – a red one – down, and picks up a blue one. Red for the roof and dark blue for the sky. She wonders when it will be her turn to talk.

Daddy puts his hand on Mum’s arm. ‘Yes,’ he says again.

The lady nods. She appears to Prin to be thinking hard. ‘What about with –’ she glances at her notes – ‘Jane? How much did you talk to … Jane about what happened between her parents?’

Another silence.

This time it is Mum who breaks it. ‘Very little,’ she says. ‘We weren’t sure … we thought it best—’

And then Daddy jumps in to explain it all to the lady. He gets her to see how it is, very simply.

‘That’s not how we do things in our house,’ he says.

Now it is Prin’s turn. Mum and Daddy are sent out of the room, though Prin has a feeling they are still watching her from somewhere. Maybe from behind the big mirror in the wall. The lady rests her elbows on her knees and leans down towards Prin. Prin wishes now that she wasn’t sitting on the floor. She pushes the paper with her drawing away. The roof, the sky, the girl, the wings. She isn’t sure why she decided to draw that.

‘Thank you for coming to chat with me today,’ says the lady. She has quite a nice face, Prin supposes. She looks old, but she is smiley. ‘I’m keen to know a little bit about you. You and your family and … your cousin.’

‘Okay …’ says Prin slowly. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Well. How about you tell me how you feel about your cousin. Did you like her? Did the two of you get along?’

Prin wrinkles her nose. These are sort of silly questions. ‘Yes. We shared a room. I let her play with all my toys. We played lots of games together.’

The lady waits as if she’s expecting Prin to say something else then. But Prin doesn’t.

‘Were there any games you liked to play most?’

Prin isn’t sure how best to answer that. She isn’t sure what she’s supposed to say. They would play with dolls, and on the grass under the sprinklers, and jumping games like the one at the beach. Then the hammer game that they got into trouble for. So which was the right answer out of all of that?

‘I have a zoetrope,’ says Prin. ‘Jane especially likes that.’

‘A zoetrope?’

Prin looks up, checking. ‘You must know what that is?’

The lady nods.