‘Why couldn’t you – you said you couldn’t stop?’ Cathy says, trying not to sound like a police officer. Frannie might not notice what she is implying, but Joe will. It takes hardly anything for him to become her defender, for both to turn their backs on her.

‘It isn’t that I couldn’t stop,’ Frannie says, her expression open and earnest, a fingernail following a striation in the wood of the pine kitchen table. ‘It’s that I didn’t know where he was.’ She reaches a hand through the gingham, checking on Paul.

‘William?’

Frannie nods. She reaches to untie her dark hair from the thick bundle on the top of her head. It falls around her shoulders like a shampoo advert. ‘I couldn’t stop immediately. Obviously. And, when I did, I had to find him. The impact –’ She pauses for just a second. ‘It moved him. And I couldn’t work out how far I had travelled after the impact. It was so dark – you know what it’s like here. It took ages. To find a – a person in the … to find him on the verge.’

Cathy says nothing, trying to think it through. It does make sense, in that real life is often more complicated than hypothetical situations. Cathy once ran into the back of a taxi and, in her panic to pull over, steered to the right instead of the left. Nobody would believe that if she said it in defence of herself, but it was true nevertheless.

Frannie’s eyes are clear as Cathy’s meet hers. Unwavering. Naturally sunny and unsuspicious, she is the alkaline to Joe’s acid. I couldn’t stop immediately. The words echo in Cathy’s mind.

‘And then,’ she continues, dropping her gaze, her voice low, the exact same voice she uses when Paul is asleep and she doesn’t want to wake him, ‘I called you two because … I wanted you there. In my …’ Cathy can tell she is trying to hold back tears. Gone is the chaos of last night, when they wrung out blood-soaked t-shirts and shouted. ‘In – at a time when I felt scared and I needed you, I wanted you,’ she says. ‘I know it should have been an ambulance.’

‘Yes,’ Cathy whispers, looking at her sister. ‘Yes.’ She understands completely. Frannie is the youngest sibling and they have never quite forgotten that. Cathy makes Frannie’s lunch most days and brings it into the practice. Not because Frannie can’t, but because she’s … well, she’s babied.

She looks at Joe, whose eyes are on her, his expression drawn. He holds her gaze for a moment longer than he would usually.

He clears his throat, moves away from his position by the door and sits next to Frannie. He scoots his chair slightly closer to her.

‘We need to do something to make the police think he is alive,’ Joe says. ‘We need to stage a missing person’s investigation.’

Cathy pauses for a second, digesting this. ‘False hope,’ she says softly. She tucks her hair behind her ears, saying nothing, thinking. Thinking how they can’t do this, how they’re monsters. If Frannie is the baby of their family, then Cathy is the conscience. Isn’t it up to her to stop this? ‘That’s – that’s wicked,’ she says quietly.