Zeb paused, his face clouding. “You looked at my sketches?”

Emma flushed. “I didn’t think you’d mind. They’re really good, Zeb. But I just wondered about—”

“Don’t go through my stuff, Mum. My sketchbook was in the drawer. It’s not like it was just lying around.”

She saw him take a breath, eyes closing, lips tightening. Was he counting to ten? Had he learned that in his anger-management sessions?

What had happened to the little boy who used to have air-guitar contests with his grandparents, who’d held the end of a tape measure for hours when Emma had been fitting out the shop, who’d told his nursery teacher he was going to marry his mum when he grew up, as if it were a viable option? And what had happened, even, to her teenager who loved music and cooking and comics?

You happened, she thought, seeing Robin’s fuzzy outline in her mind, anger and fear blooming again.

Zeb opened his eyes. “I haven’t got much time,” he said, curt now. “There’s stuff to finish in the garden before it goes dark.”

It was so tempting to swerve the conversation toward something easier for their last few minutes. She had to hear the end of his story, though. What he knew about Freya.

“What else happened, Zeb?”

He gazed out of the screen, not quite meeting her eye, though it was hard to tell whether that was a side effect of Skype or a deliberate avoidance.

“We messed about on the play area for a bit longer, drinking and racing each other up and down the climbing frame. Then we decided to head home. We had those photos taken in the booth at the station, just for fun. But on the train she got really upset again. Started talking about her parents . . .”

“Her parents?” Emma glanced at the ceiling as if she’d be able to see into the Harlows’ flat. There was a creak of floorboards, the tapping of a pipe. Zeb seemed pensive now. For a moment the light silhouetted him completely, like a television interviewee with their identity protected.

Emma thrust away the mental image of Robin hovering at the edges of the frame.

When Zeb looked back at her, his eyes were wide. “Parents think they can keep secrets from their kids. But we find stuff out and it’s even more shitty because of the lies.”

She felt like she’d been slapped. As Zeb plowed on, explaining the rest of what Freya had told him, she had to work hard to concentrate. She knew how important it was but she just wanted to sob at his pointed comparison, to defend herself, to apologize, to rage.

26.

CHRIS