Sophie was pale now, her face pinched tight with shock. She didn’t say a word: I couldn’t work out if that was a good or a bad sign. All I could do was carry on.

‘And it kind of broke me. Home wasn’t a home anymore. I didn’t trust anyone. I didn’t trust myself. And if you don’t trust yourself – if you don’t like yourself – then it doesn’t really matter what you do to yourself, does it?’

‘Esther?’ she said, the name uttered with such disbelief that it sounded like an unfamiliar foreign word that she couldn’t pronounce. ‘Our nanny – Esther?’

‘Yes. I know it’s hard to believe, but… that’s why it was so impossible for me to survive intact, Sophie. It took me apart.’

I could say it now. Being surrounded in Devon by all those warm, kind faces as I shared the darkest truths of my family had finally let me own the trauma of what had happened on my terms. But then I thought of what I’d seen next – who Mum really was for me – and my clarity was overwhelmed by shaky terror. I took a long gulp of water and a mouthful of food, trying to steady myself. Perhaps I could text Amber when I got out of here, let her be the one to steady me the way she always did. I was so lucky that she didn’t even restrict my contact to sessions anymore.

‘Rachel, are you sure?’ pleaded Sophie. ‘I mean – Dad? Is he really capable of that?’

‘Do you really think they’re happy?’ I said.

She paused, her bottom lip pinned tight by her teeth, the way she used to hold it when she was first learning to colour inside the lines. Love rushed up inside me, but I didn’t say a word.

‘I mean, I don’t think they’re love’s young dream,’ she said eventually. ‘They bicker, but then, they’re both strong characters.’ Her voice was rising with distress, and I felt a stab of guilt at smashing her pretty picture to smithereens, but then I thought of Amber. The way that she’d taught me to value truth and integrity above the numb comfort of lies. ‘I’ve never had to think about it. They’ve just been Mum and Dad.’

‘I’m sorry—’ I said, but it was her turn to cut across me.

‘Tell me properly, Rachel,’ she said, eyes blazing. ‘I need to understand this properly.’

And I told her the story of that day, and how it had allowed me to put together all the strange inconsistencies of the months leading up to it. The way our workaholic Dad had started regularly ‘working from home’, his eagerness to pick up our au pair from late nights out. And the phoney war of the weeks that stretched out afterwards, before Esther’s abrupt and unexplained departure.