‘Oh,’ says Prin. ‘Well, that’s good.’ She shifts her legs. All this kneeling is giving her pins and needles.

‘So you got along, and you liked playing together. But tell me, was your cousin ever sad? Did she cry, for example, or sometimes get frightened?’

Prin wants to laugh. She wants to say, All the time! But she doesn’t want to say mean things about her cousin, plus she remembers what Daddy has always said: No tears in this house! So: ‘No,’ Prin tells the lady. ‘She was always very happy.’

‘Oh … I see. And what about the night on the roof,’ the lady says. ‘Was Jane happy then?’

Prin feels a rush of feeling in her chest, remembering it all again. The breeze and the stars and Jane’s eyes gleaming and the silhouette of her against the sky just before … just before …

Prin sits up straight. ‘I didn’t push her,’ she says. Prin feels it’s important to say that right straight up. She even repeats it. ‘Not on the rock and not on the roof. I didn’t.’

The lady’s face looks so serious that Prin can’t help wanting to laugh.

‘So what did happen?’ the lady says.

Prin opens her mouth, then closes it again. She thought all the words were there, but they seem to have run away from her. It somehow isn’t so clear when she has to explain it aloud.

‘Jane was a bit scared,’ she says, slowly. ‘And the zoetrope wasn’t working. I took her up to the roof. I liked going up there before, by myself.’

The lady nods. ‘Yes?’

‘She wanted to fly,’ says Prin. ‘We had done it before. Flying. At the beach. She loved it. It made her happy. And she saw her parents up in the sky. She said, I’m imagining it, I’m imagining it. Things can come real, you know, like that.’

‘Become real?’ Now the lady is frowning.

‘Like the onion,’ says Prin. ‘You can say something, and you can imagine it, or wish it, or picture it happening, and then it goes that way. It’s just true.’

The lady makes a careful note on her page. ‘And so … on the roof?’

Prin goes still. She looks up at this lady, right into her eyes. She feels something cold and soft move on the bottom of her stomach. When she looks at the papers the lady has laid out on the table in front of her, she sees the names in there.

She sees Sarah Jane Jones.

And she sees her own name too. Her real name.

‘It was Make-Believe,’ she whispers. ‘And Make-Believe is just real.’ She doesn’t know why this lady can’t understand that. She thought this was a grown-up game. She thought this was a grown-up rule.

‘So was it real to you?’ the lady asks. ‘What you were doing up there on the roof?’