“What’s going on?” I ask Mum.

“I don’t know, love.” Mum walks forward and I shuffle along beside her.

Auntie Rach looks up as we get near. Her face is red and shiny, like a glazed cherry.

“They’re keeping Becca in,” she says. “I think I need to get her a solicitor.”

Everything smears. All I can see is a blur of light with the negatives of my aunt and Mum emblazoned onto it.

—

Mum and I come home while Auntie Rach stays at the police station. When we get back to the flat I turn freezing cold and can’t stop shaking. Mum puts me to bed, brings me a hot Ribena, lays her hand on my forehead, like I’ve got flu. I think she’s going to speak but she stays quiet, her palm a heavy blanket on my skin. I’m almost asleep by the time I hear my bedroom door hitch on my lumpy carpet as she closes it behind her.

Sometime during the night I half wake to the hiss of an argument. I swim up through layers of sleep, disentangling myself from a net of bad dreams, and I make out Auntie Rach’s voice, and Mum’s . . . but no Becca.

Mum saying, Trouble ever since she got here . . .

And then . . . pills. They were Becca’s pills, and they killed him.

Sleep drags me back down. When I next open my eyes, the silence feels solid. There’s a clear expanse of carpet where Becca’s sleeping bag should be. I haul myself out of bed to find that Auntie Rach is gone. So are all her things, Becca’s too.

—

The news comes a few days later. Time has become elastic by then, a rubber band stretching from the point at which I stirred the pills into the beer and eggs, forever in danger of snapping back. Mum and I barely talk. Often I catch her looking at me sideways, a question in her eyes. She’s as pale and tired as she was before he died and the weight’s still peeling off her.

The phone rings while I’m in the bath. I hear Mum’s footsteps travel toward it but can’t tell what she’s saying once the ringing stops. I get out, pull on some clothes and venture into the living room. Mum’s perched on the arm of a chair, twirling an unlit cigarette.

Her eyes slide toward me. “Becca’s been charged.”

“What?”

“With Nick’s murder.”

“Murder?” The word burns. I can’t swallow it, must spit it out, but it won’t shift and I’m running out of air. “But . . . no . . . that’s crazy . . .”

“Is it?” Mum pinches each end of the fag, little crumbles of tobacco escaping. “Becca’s always been unpredictable. And she’s had an obsession with Nick since she got here.”

I shake my head. “No. The pills . . . he took them accidentally, surely . . .”