‘Stay in there,’ I tell him. ‘It’s all right. It’s just a letter that’s come for me.’

The pages are a mess, their order broken apart, but I can see from the dates that they go a long way back. All the way back to eight years ago.

I try to scoop them all up, but they keep slipping from my hands, the thin edges slicing at my fingertips. I know what these are. I know. And then I see what I was meant to see all along. It’s a page with just nine words on it, set out in capitals, in thick bold marker pen. It says:

STOP LOOKING

YOU’RE CRAZY

LEAVE HER ALONE

I drop the papers I have just gathered up and they scatter all over the floor again. I feel as though I have been burned, scorched.

Charlie calls out again. ‘Mummy! I’m scared!’

Frantically now, I crouch down again, choking back the sobs in my throat. This time, I manage to scoop all the pages up, a tangled bundle in my arms. I stagger through into the kitchen and drag out a recycling bag from under the sink. Behind me, I hear Charlie’s footsteps. He has got out of his bed, out of his room. His eyes are huge in the white of his face. ‘What is it, Mummy?’

I cram every one of the pages into the see-through bag, crushing them down.

‘It’s fine,’ I tell Charlie. ‘It’s fine.’

I knot the handles of the bag, so tightly that nothing could ever get out. I force myself to smile at Charlie. ‘It’s nothing,’ I tell him. ‘A letter came, but it wasn’t important. Look, it’s so unimportant that I’m throwing it away.’ I hold up the bag, the papers like weird, flat creatures inside.

YOU’RE CRAZY. YOU’RE CRAZY.

I must be. Look at me. Charlie is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, a black ghost in the hallway light. I know what it says in those awful pages. I know what’s written down about what I did.