I take a sip of tea. “It was such a shock, seeing her sister in our house, seeing you chatting away with her in the hall.” My words barely scratch the surface of how that felt, how it still feels. “She was so horrible to me after Alice died. She blamed me for her sister’s death.”

Ross comes over to me on the sofa and strokes my cheek with his finger. “Oh, sweetheart.”

I want to tell him what it was like for me back then, but what can I say? Where can I start? And how can I tell him that it’s not just Catherine’s reappearance that’s upset me, though God knows, that’s bad enough, it’s what she represents. The past and all the things I don’t want to have to think about. The things I’ve deliberately not thought about, that I’ve packed away at the very furthest corners of my mind.

“Now don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, “because I’m not trying to make excuses for her behavior. I’m absolutely not. Scaring a thirteen-year-old girl late at night is a despicable thing to do, but…” He shakes his head. “Grief affects people in different ways. She’d just lost her sister.”

“And I’d lost my best friend and was having to contend with rumors that it was me who’d killed her!”

He exhales through closed lips. “I’m presuming you had some kind of counseling to help you cope with all this?”

“Of course I did.”

Angela Harris. I see her face before me, as if the last twelve years have been stripped away and I’m back in that bland, beige room with the picture of snow-tipped mountains on the wall and the box of tissues on the table between us. I watch her lips part as she readies herself to speak, hear her dispassionate voice asking me, once again, if there is anything else I’d like to tell her, anything at all that might be troubling me.

Ross sighs. “I think you should get some sleep and we’ll talk again in the morning. It’s late and we’re both tired. I don’t want you getting ill.”

We both know what he means. Tiredness and stress: a dangerous combination as far as my epilepsy is concerned. He’s never witnessed me having a full-blown seizure and, with any luck, he never will. He thinks he’s seen me at my worst—puking into a toilet bowl when I had a stomach upset, drenched in sweat. He hasn’t seen me at my worst. Nowhere near. But then, nor have I. That’s the worst thing about this condition—other people witness my body doing things I’ll never be able to see.