I hold up my phone and take a picture of him. For a moment my fingers hover over my contacts, then I select Dad’s email and forward the photo to him. Since my unannounced visit, he’s been calling more often and even got Mum to finally come to the phone. Those conversations are brief and stilted. But at least, I tell myself, it’s a start.

‘The slide, Mummy?’ shouts Charlie. ‘Can I go on the slide?’

I hold my phone camera up again. ‘Of course!’

Sarah chose to live in a fantasy. A fantasy partly of Freya’s making. And in trying to unravel that fantasy, I came close to losing my own mind. It sent me on that downwards spiral until I didn’t know which way was up. But I was vulnerable already, of course I was.

Because of my own fantasy I was living.

But crossing those words out in my file and writing the real ones is what has freed me. Facing the awful, painful truth. I wasn’t well back then, and I should have had help. The rift in my reality began right back then.

Now I am sound in body and mind. I can tell what is true now and what is false. Now I have Charlie, safe with me, happy in the light of this bright spring day.

I shiver. A cloud passes over the sun, and sunlight and shade blur in its shadow. How easily it can happen, I think. To layer one reality over another. How powerful the mind is. How fragile. But I wrote the truth in my own hand in my notes, and I keep that page with all my other strategies and tools. On the top. In case, like Sarah, I should ever be tempted again.

I pull my jacket a little more tightly around me as Charlie runs up to me, takes my hand in his. I look down at him, straight on, and smile. I know what I did to him, long ago. I can look that too, now, squarely in the face.

So that’s what I have to remember from here on. Not to forget. And not to look away.

I squeeze Charlie’s hand in mine. The sun comes out, shining bright again, almost too bright to properly see by.

‘All good?’ I say to him, screwing my eyes up a little in the glare.

Charlie looks up at me, his face so open, his smile only ever-so-slightly lopsided. ‘All good,’ he tells me. ‘One hundred per cent fine.’

And I keep smiling back, my heart skittering in my chest, and tell myself that I really do believe him.

Acknowledgements