Goosebumps cover Joe’s shoulders. His teeth begin chattering. He thinks of the image of Frannie with a gun. How natural it looked. How anybody here could be in danger in the right circumstances, at the whim of anybody’s temper, their volatility, their desperation. No, he thinks. Not this.

51.

Cathy

‘I’ll just – I’ll just hand myself in,’ Frannie says. Her nose is running, two clear tracks of liquid dripping on to her philtrum like a child’s.

‘What …’ Cathy says, but she’s speechless, truly speechless. All the blood. That’s why. Something has gone very cold inside her, right in her middle. Who is this woman standing in front of her? How could she have lied to her the other night at their parents’, when she thought they were finally being honest?

Cathy thinks of Tom suddenly, and how she left him high and dry in her bed, his face disappointed, his naked form embarrassed. Fuck. Why is she like this? So loyal to these two? He’s right. He’s right. It is claustrophobic to live near to her siblings, this near, to keep their secrets, to bury bodies for them. If she could choose, would she choose Frannie and Joe? She doesn’t know, despite loving them, but she does know this: she would choose Tom. She hardly knows him, but already she prefers him.

And it is that which cements the decision in Cathy’s mind: she is not going to sacrifice herself any further. Not even for her sister. Not for the stranger her sister has become.

‘I hit him accidentally,’ Frannie says. She pulls at the neck of her t-shirt and wipes her nose on it. ‘And then he sat up, just as I stopped. I was so … he started yelling at me. Saying I was mad, I was the mad woman he’d seen earlier, he was going to tell everyone. He kept gesturing to his side, where I’d grazed it. Saying he’d call the cops. And I just … there were just a few inches in it.’

‘In it?’

Cathy glances at Joe. She’s stepped back from Frannie, but his arms still encircle her. His face has changed and hardened. She shivers, there in her sister’s kitchen, though she isn’t cold.

‘Between the brake and the accelerator,’ Frannie says into Joe’s chest. ‘The worst had happened, I don’t know. It was – you probably know a word for it. Fatalistic, maybe? He was … it was just – I panicked.’

‘You hit him again,’ Cathy says, staring at the tableau of her brother and sister. God, they’re fucked. They’re absolutely fucked. She looks at the ceiling and tries not to cry. They should have handed Frannie over. Testified that she wasn’t in the wrong. God knows, but, right now, it feels as though they have chosen the worst path of them all. Burying a fucking body. What were they thinking?

‘I ran over his legs,’ Frannie says thickly. ‘And then I waited. I just … how can it be a crime? To move your foot slightly over one pedal rather than the other … and then to just – do nothing? I was so scared. You’ve no idea.’ Her eyes seem to turn down as she tries to explain herself. ‘You have got no idea how that situation felt to me. How frightened I was.’