“Luckily, there’s no damage to Melissa’s finger, but I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything like that again.”

“But she said I killed Alice! It’s not fair. Why aren’t you making her promise she won’t say things like that again?”

“I’ll be talking to Melissa in a moment. But whatever she did or didn’t say, attacking someone is never the right thing to do.”

“I didn’t attack her, I…”

I look down at my shoes. I did attack her and I can’t pretend otherwise. It’s a miracle I didn’t snap her finger right off. Now I’ve made things a whole lot worse for myself. Everyone’s going to think I’ve got violent tendencies. Melissa will tell her parents and they’ll talk to the Dawsons, and then the police will want to talk to me again and maybe the coroner will change her verdict and I’ll have to go to court and it’ll be in the papers, and it’s all Catherine Dawson’s fault. Catherine Dawson is the evil one. Not me.

11

NOW

On Saturday morning, I’m already up when Ross comes down in his lounge pants and T-shirt. He peers over my shoulder as I scroll through the Greenwich University website.

“If you’re going to do a degree,” he says, “you’ll need somewhere to do your assignments. Maybe we could put a desk in the spare room.”

He’s right. We might call this room the study, but we both know it’s really his. Just like the house. When Ross first suggested that I move in with him, I told him I’d feel guilty about not being able to contribute to the bills, at least not until I’d found a job. “But we’re a couple, aren’t we?” he said. “And couples look after each other. Besides, it’s going to be your house, too. As soon as we’re married, we’ll get the deeds put in our joint names.”

He leans across me to reach for his diary and, as he does, his eyes settle on the photo of his mother that he’s slid under the edge of the notice-board frame to avoid putting a pin in it. She’s wearing a long black raincoat and smiling, shyly, at the camera. It’s one of the few pictures he has of her.

“You should get a frame for that.”

“I know,” he says. “I keep meaning to.”

“I wish I’d met her,” I say, and make a mental note to buy a frame for it myself. Surprise him with it.

“You’d have loved her,” he says, his voice gravelly with emotion.