I think of those emails from Will, aggressive emails, scary emails, and of Frannie’s position as a single mother, and everything that’s happened since. Joe’s stoicism in the dock at his trial. Frannie’s weight loss, and then weight gain. The way she seemed to deliberate, sometimes, before doing things, as though they required the effort of a marathon. The way the waterline underneath her eyes was red for a year. She lost Paul temporarily in her depression, but that doesn’t mean she deserves to lose him permanently. What is justice, anyway, if not suffering?

I reach across the bed and grasp Frannie’s hand. It’s warm, where it used to be cold, even with the window open letting in the spring breeze and the sun, a sharp-and-sweet combination. Frannie grabs the throw from the end of her bed and scoots closer to me, wrapping us both up in it.

‘I think it’s time to move forwards,’ I say. ‘Don’t you?’

Frannie smiles at me, a wobbling smile that only partly resembles her old, unhindered grin, and grasps tightly at my hand. ‘Let’s,’ she says.

I squeeze her warm hands, inside the blankets. Together, our grips are encased within the kind of forts we used to make when we were little.

Tom is waiting for me in his house.

‘How was it?’ he says to me, opening his front door wide. He’s wearing a cream-coloured woollen jumper and holding a cup of half-drunk coffee. His feet are bare. ‘Made you a pot and then drank almost all of it myself,’ he says with a smile.

‘It was okay,’ I say. ‘I saw Frannie too, after.’

‘Tough day,’ he says softly.

My nose must be red from crying in the car, thinking of Frannie tucked up under that blanket. Her nurse said on the way out that she will be strong enough for release soon. That Paul will begin to spend overnights with her shortly after that.

‘Yeah,’ I say, looking into his brown eyes and thinking that I never would have done it if it weren’t for him. Who knows where they would have ended up. A worse place, surely.

‘What now?’ I say to Tom. ‘Now that it’s over?’

‘Whatever you want,’ he says. ‘Whatever you want.’

‘All rise,’ a clerk says. The jury and the judge file in. I watch from the public gallery, only a few feet but several hundred light years away from my mother and father. They say they don’t understand why I have testified against Joe, but I hope one day they will. Maybe one day we can tell them the real story. When they’re ready.

When everybody is settled, the judge addresses the jury. ‘Have you reached a verdict on all charges upon which you are all agreed?’

‘Yes,’ the foreman says. He is exactly as you might imagine a foreman. In a jacket and shirt, where everybody else is tired and casual. Glasses. I wouldn’t be surprised to spot a briefcase at his feet.