Liv waits out several waves of tears and also has the good sense not to mention that I’ve barricaded myself in my room for almost two days, with Mum leaving increasingly elaborate tray meals outside my door.

My bed is awash with scrunched-up tissues and old Balmoral yearbooks that I’ve been flicking through on repeat repeat repeat. I have my phone and my laptop somewhere here on the Good Ship Natalia, but I’m sick of the outside world and want to float only on my bed, which is cut off from the mainland and surrounded by an ocean of my very own snot and tears.

If only I was still friends with Yin. If only I had realised what I had when I had it. If only I could remember our last conversation. If only I had called her out of the blue that night and shifted the course of history. If only we still had slumber parties and I’d been there to protect her.

‘You’re into drugs,’ I dig my chin into Liv’s collarbone. ‘Can you get something to make me stop crying?’

‘It’s better to let it out.’ My sister sounds like a bona fide adult. ‘Plus you’re one of those annoying people who looks good when they cry. You should have seen me after Mel and I broke up.’

Liv acts out how grotesquely she wept and it prompts a smile from me, a smile that makes me immediately guilty for feeling anything except the worst ever, when Yin is where? In a metal drawer in a morgue that looks like the one on Devil Creek?

The tears leave me now, adios until the next round comes and grabs me by the throat and shakes me down. Periods of calm followed by one thought—I can’t believe she’s gone—and then the earth shakes and the rocks fall and the rivers burst their banks and I come close to throwing up my own stomach, followed by all my major organs.

I’ve been having nightmares about what Yin’s last hours or minutes might have been like, how scared she was, how much she saw, did she know this was the end, what was the last thing she said, was she in pain and on and on and on.

‘Look at these…’ Liv has wonder in her voice. ‘I can’t believe you kept them all.’

Neither can I. I’m sure I should hate Balmoral but instead I have religiously kept every single yearbook from prep through to last year’s. The Junior School ones are thin and simple, but the yearbooks from Year Seven onwards are glossy, full-colour books.