‘I should tell my mum and dad,’ Beth blurted out, a panicked anger pulsing inside her. ‘About how you’re a freak! About how your parents were brother and sister!’

‘It was never true!’ Corinne cried. She was having to shout now to be heard above the din of the water. ‘It was just a story, something I made up to tease you! But you believed it, because you are a little child! Always asking me what to do. How to act. What to decide. Can’t you make up your own mind?’

‘No, it’s not like that. I … I thought we were friends – best friends—’

‘So childish—’

‘I’ve learned so much from you, Corinne. It’s not that I want you to decide for me—’

‘Childish, childish—’

‘Listen to me! I respect you, okay? And I need you,’ her voice cracked. ‘Please, Corinne. She doesn’t love you. Not like I do.’

‘You love me?’ Corinne frowned and the fear opened out inside Beth, hope plummeting as she saw the instant withdrawal in Corinne’s face, her features closing down with suspicion. ‘You love me but you would tell my secret?’

The waterfall roared. A wind had whipped up – it rushed through the trees and over the surface of the river. High up on the craggy ledge, Beth could see her parents, their brightly coloured rain jackets like flares amidst the dull browns and fading greens.

‘Perhaps,’ Corinne said now, her eyes narrowing, ‘I should tell them yours.’

A sudden plunge in Beth’s stomach. ‘You wouldn’t.’

‘Sometimes I think I should. That it would be better for you if I did. A kindness.’

‘I wouldn’t have told them. I was just saying that because I was upset,’ Beth admitted quickly, desperately, blinking away the tears. ‘I love you, Corinne. I really do.’

So often, she had thought about saying those words. Even now, as she made the admission, she didn’t know how to qualify it. How to explain that it wasn’t a sexual thing – she didn’t think it was that. It was a need. A huge, hungry want inside her. A loneliness that only receded when they were together. An anxiety that grew calm when Corinne was there.

‘I don’t know what to do without you.’

A pressure was building inside her. She felt it now as Corinne stepped towards her.

‘You need to grow up, Beth,’ she said, her voice raised to be heard above the noise of the river. ‘Stop playing these silly games. The school, Sasha – rumours on Facebook, fake boys? It’s all so stupid and pointless. Don’t you see? A waste of time. No one will care. No one will even notice.’

The wind whipped her hair and she turned to free it, her voice getting lost in the wind so that Beth had to ask her to repeat it.