“No,” Dad said quickly. “We didn’t know. We knew there was a chance. Just as you know there’s a chance for you. But the point is, it never stopped her from living any part of her life fully and it shouldn’t stop you. I sometimes think we should never have told you. I was afraid you would live your whole life in the shadow of something that might never happen and I was right.”

“How could you have a kid when you knew what could happen?” I said, voice shaking. I pressed my fingertips tight against my thumb. Don’t cry.

“Honestly,” Dad said, rubbing his face, his words coming out from between his hands, “when we found out she was pregnant I asked her if she was sure this was a good idea. Your mother insisted it was her life, her choice to make.” Dad’s voice cracked. “Then when you came along, I felt so ashamed that I’d ever thought you could be a bad idea.” He said it like an apology.

It wasn’t the apology I wanted.

“Well, you were wrong,” I said through gritted teeth, and I pushed past Beth as she wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “It wasn’t just her life.”

31.

My mother knew before I was born that she might lose her mind. That I’d lose her. That she could abandon me. It was like stepping off the waltzer when your body thinks it’s still spinning, but the ground beneath you is still. Like the moment of finding out for the first time that Mum had dementia, of Hannah breaking up with me, of realizing that Mum had to move out, of being told Dad was getting remarried. Over and over again I kept settling into a new way of living. I’d reel and then adapt and just when I thought I knew what life was going to be now, it threw something else at me. I thought I was living on a roller coaster like everyone else, ups and downs, but my life was more like emotional dodgeball and I kept getting hit. And yet again, like at all the worst moments of my life, I had nowhere to turn.

My phone buzzed again and I checked it this time, more out of habit than any real interest in what the message was. Downstairs, when I felt it go, I had hoped against my will that it was Ruby. But the texts were from people from school asking about my results. Shane and Georgia, who I’d hung about with a bit but hadn’t spoken to since the last exam, and a couple of others who I barely spoke to at all, the kind of people who needed to compare their results to everyone else to figure out if they were happy about their own or not. I ignored them all. Another text came in while I was deleting those.

OLIVER