The family. Since Nick’s death I’ve realized he didn’t exist in a vacuum, didn’t appear out of nowhere just to make our lives a misery. He has a dad and a brother who live somewhere down south. Mum murmurs on the phone to them, awkward and unsure because she doesn’t even know them; they’re having contact only because they were all connected to someone who’s dead. I try to listen in, try to guess whether his dad’s crying, whether his family loved him. Once I hear a raised voice at the other end, and afterward I catch Mum whispering to Auntie Rach, “They want answers.”

At the moment I get most of my information from eavesdropping. I hoover up overheard fragments, one-sided phone calls. Neighbors pop round with steamed-up Tupperware boxes of food, and I lurk in the background, wondering what they’d think if they knew even half the truth. The police ask us questions about the weeks leading up to Nick’s death: Had he been ill or acting oddly? To my relief, Mum mostly keeps me out of it. My legs go soft each time I see the flash of a uniform through the peephole in our door.

About a week after his death, the word antidepressants starts cropping up in the hushed conversations Mum and Auntie Rach have when they think Becca and I are asleep. At first I wonder if Mum’s started taking them: I check the bathroom cabinet but there’s only a gnawed red toothbrush and a bar of dusty white soap. The next night, I hear them discussing it again and I manage to grasp the thread this time. I scurry over to Becca and shake her.

Her eyes fly open. We’re both on a knife edge at the moment. Always waiting. Some days I can convince myself no one will ever know what we did. Other days a confession prickles like ground-up glass on my tongue.

Becca snaps into a sitting position. “What is it?”

“Nick was taking antidepressants. The police found them in his house.”

She frowns. “What?”

“Maybe it was a reaction to them,” I whisper, “not to . . . to what we . . .”

Becca is silent. I can hear her breath coming in little bursts.

“Don’t you think?” I ask.

“Maybe.” She draws up her knees, hooks her arms around them. “It’s possible.”

I shuffle back to bed but can’t escape my thoughts. I wish there was somebody I could talk to, somebody who knows about medicine and postmortems and inquests. Who would answer my questions and never tell a soul that I asked.

—

Soon Auntie Rach has to go back to work, so she and Becca prepare to head back to Derby.