‘No,’ Joe says honestly. ‘I dream about myself. Getting arrested.’

‘I dream about the moment,’ Frannie says. ‘And the way we buried him. That earth … the smell. You know all this rain?’ she says. ‘I had the doors open last night and that hot earth smell – I was sure I could smell dead bodies too.’ She says all this in a low voice, staring into the distance.

‘Our DNA will be on that body.’ Joe looks at Cathy as he says it.

‘They didn’t take our DNA.’

‘But they could recall us for testing. And if we don’t go, we’ll look –’

‘Let’s deal in realities, not hypotheticals,’ Cathy says. ‘It’s easy to stand here and imagine the worst all the time.’ She looks up at him, eyes clear and smart in the darkness, and he trusts her. He has to.

Joe sighs, staring at the ground. ‘I wish it were different,’ he says.

‘I know,’ Cathy says. ‘We buried him pretty deep. I don’t know how deep foundations go. Maybe not that deep.’

‘I wish we’d left him,’ Joe says. ‘We could have faked a suicide.’ Cathy winces.

He glances back towards their parents’ house. ‘They’re so … don’t you wish we could tell them?’

Frannie exhales quickly. ‘Definitely not,’ she says. ‘They’d fall apart.’

Joe huffs. ‘I mean … don’t you wish they wouldn’t?’

‘Oh, yeah. But they’re stuck in the past. With Rosie. That’s what Deb says.’

‘What does Deb know?’ Joe says nastily.

‘They used to be – they weren’t always this way,’ Cathy says, ignoring him. Neither he nor Cathy have many friends. It’s the demands of the job. He knows he’s jealous, but he can’t help himself. He can’t imagine telling a friend all of the inner layers of their family.

Cathy continues. ‘They were … do you remember when we went to France? On the Haven Holiday?’

Joe nods quickly. Their father had lost his glasses while drunk. They’d laughed for hours while he felt his way around the campsite like a mole, eventually uncovering them in a bush. He remembers so much about that holiday. Zipping down waterslides, riding horses. Picnics with inaccurate French produce – apricot buns they thought were normal bread, and had to eat with burgers regardless.

‘Apricot burgers,’ he says, smiling at Cathy, who smiles back. ‘Do you think they’ll ever … I don’t know. Loosen up?’ he asks. ‘Acknowledge her birthday?’

‘No,’ Cathy says sadly. ‘Some things scar you forever.’ She looks away from him. ‘They just can’t handle it. That’s why they go into hiding.’

‘I wish I could remember,’ Frannie says. ‘I don’t remember this.’ She brings her hands to her forehead. ‘This – this fun.’

‘They were fun,’ Joe says, bringing an arm around his younger sister’s shoulders, the three of them silhouetted against the sky. He wishes for just a second that Rosie was still here too, or at the very least that their parents could have dealt with losing her, somehow. Somehow differently to the way that they have. The loss of it chokes him. She would be almost thirty. He can’t begin to imagine what she’d look like. If she would have come to Verona with them.