‘The doctors said she was improving. The chemo was working. She was still terminally ill, but her prognosis had become years instead of months. But she didn’t believe them. She believed she only had weeks. She said she’d seen her future, and the doctors were either lying or wrong. That she would die a terrible, slow, agonising death unless I helped her to beat it.’

And at once, I’m in that room again: the darkness, the silver thread of light, Mum’s bed, the small wire-grid window. I can smell her stale, sour breath. Hear those long swinging tubes; the endless drip, drip, drip of fluid in the dark. Heat fizzes through my body, ugly and burning. The bottle rattles as I open it. All the pills she’d stockpiled at home after so many operations. Because she’d known. She’d seen. And when I hesitate, when I start to say no again, she presses her cool and steady fingers over mine. The curly wisps of hair at her temples and that serene half-smile.

Please, Maggie. You have to help me. You have to believe me. Make it go away.

And I can feel the wet burn of the tears that run off my chin and soak into my shirt as I shake all those pills out into my hand.

‘I did it,’ I manage to say to Will now, blinking against that bright square of daylight behind the curtain. ‘I helped her. Just because she asked me to. The hospital thought she’d done it herself. I mean, she could have, you know? She could have. She just … she wanted us to do it together. She wanted me to be there.’

I finally find the courage to look at Will again, but his expression is very carefully blank. I take in a breath like I’ve been holding it underwater and it makes both of us jump.

‘I need her to have been right about us being psychic, about everything she told me. I need her not to have lied. Not to have coached me. Not to have made any of it up. I need to have been Andrew MacNeil. I need that to be true. Because otherwise … otherwise, I helped my own mother to die because of a delusion. Maybe our delusion.’ I notice I’m twisting my fingers again. ‘And because … she made me do it, she made me help her, she made me feel like this … and I need it not to have been just another one of her godawful tests.’

I shake my head, close my eyes. ‘All those years ago – here – I was certain, Will. I really was. And Mum, her whole life, was always so, so certain of us. I think I’ve always thought in the back of my mind that maybe … maybe at least some of it was real. That maybe we did know what other people forget or can’t see. That we come back.’ I’m almost whispering; my throat working too hard to swallow. ‘Because if Mum – if she was right, if she was psychic, and everything she said was true, then what I did was a mercy, a kindness. It was the right thing.’