Cover

Dedication

For Mum and Dad

PROLOGUE

It feels intimate—wrong—to be in her bedroom when she’s not home. The duvet is rucked up to expose the wrinkled corner of a sheet. The pretend-gold bracelet I bought her sits coiled at the back of her nightstand, no longer inseparable from her wrist. It looks cheap in this light, childish and flimsy, and my skin prickles with shame.

I turn on the spot, eyes roaming over photos and furniture that seem newly alien, knowing yet not knowing what I’m looking for. This room feels like a foreign country now. Out of bounds. I remember when there were no borders between her space and mine.

Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be, with children and parents?

Guilt stirs as I slide open the bedside drawer to see a black hairbrush, a packet of aspirin, an out-of-date magazine. Turning to the wardrobe, I glide my fingers over the dresses and pretty skirts she never wears anymore. I nose the soft fabrics, her scent trapped in them, like a memory.

Just as I’m about to retreat, my gaze falls on something at the bottom of the wardrobe. A wad of light blue fabric scrunched into the shadows of the back corner. I reach down to pick it up, but as it unfurls, shock makes me fling it away. It hits the mirror and drops to the floor, and I see it again: a dark lake of red encrusted on the front of a T-shirt.

I stand dazed. Heart thumping, I spread out the top on the carpet and stare at the dried blood, trailing my fingertips across the stain.

And that’s the moment when I know I’ll have to do something. The moment, really, that sets it all in motion.

PART ONE

1.

EMMA

If it hadn’t been for a disruptive hamster and three nights of insomnia, Emma might not have found herself crouched in her under-stairs cupboard that night. She might not have heard the fear-pinched voice from overhead.

What had possessed her to buy the hamster in the first place? Rodents were for eight-year-olds who begged their parents for a pet, not broke, blue-haired women in their thirties. Had she really thought this ice-white creature with ink-spot eyes would offer comfort? During the day he submerged himself inside a nest of shredded paper, but when Emma went to bed he burst into life, rumbling on his wheel, flooding her small flat with relentless noise.

It felt like the soundtrack to her thoughts. Trundling around and around. Last night she’d shifted the cage into the living room, but back in bed she’d still been haunted by the cycling. She’d moved it into the kitchen. Still audible. So Gilbert’s new home was this gloomy cupboard under the stairs, among dog-eared design books and unsold vintage hats.