Frannie rounds on Cathy. ‘How could you do this to me?’ she says. ‘Now is not the time to be good, Cathy!’ Joe winces. Cathy won’t like that, but it’s true. She is good, and controlled, and remote, at times too. She’s never had a relationship, to his knowledge.

He dials 112 on his keypad, and Frannie lunges for his phone, batting it out of his hand. ‘What the fuck?’ Joe shouts. The phone lies face down, the soil and the blood bleached to a thin sanitized stripe around it by its light.

‘If you call the police, I will go to prison for decades,’ Frannie shouts. She sits back down on the ground, puts her head in her hands and begins to sob.

‘Stop it, Joe,’ Cathy says.

‘Who was I supposed to call?’ Frannie says, looking up at him. ‘If not you?’

The pleading sentence, her huge wet eyes. He cannot resist. He was there for her when she laboured, alone, with Paul. He brought her whatever she wanted – and that was a lot. Iced water, a popsicle, a box of crackers she ate between contractions, and then – afterwards – a flame-grilled Whopper from Burger King that took him a forty-minute round-trip to get. Nobody is there for Frannie like Joe is.

Cathy is biting the skin around her thumbnail, staring at Frannie, her eyes wide.

Frannie passes him the phone, above her head, not looking at him. ‘But sure, do it.’

‘I …’ Joe says, hesitating, but he takes the phone. Cathy stares at the transaction, then at the lit-up rectangle in Joe’s hands. He looks at Frannie, and his resolve to do the right thing splinters to nothing, like a pane of glass being shattered. His little sister, his three-legged-race running partner, his Happy Meal sharer, his sibling, his best friend, his history.

‘I can’t,’ he says softly.

Cathy looks at him. ‘You can’t,’ she echoes. A sheen across her eyes catches the moonlight.

It looks just like the night-time at home. He, Cathy and Frannie live in a row of three cottages with no other neighbours – a feat they can’t believe they pulled off – and he almost always goes round to Frannie’s for bath time, closing his farmhouse door behind him and pushing open Frannie’s. Cathy’s and Joe’s used to be a shop and a post office respectively, with small rooms and low ceilings. Frannie’s was originally a house – part funded by their parents, for her – built in 1850, and is larger and airier than the others.

He shoves his hands into his pockets. He could hand her in. Save himself. He’d be mad not to consider it, wouldn’t he? But she looks up at him now, his baby sister, her head tilted back. No. That isn’t an option. It began its life as Frannie’s problem, but now it’s shared.

‘We need to bury it,’ Frannie says. ‘Him.’

Cathy waits a second, clearly thinking. After a moment, she says only one word: ‘Where?’