This episode, the quirky forensic pathologist with purple hair is fizzed-up over something she’s pulled out from underneath Emily Blake’s toenails and also what she describes as ‘tiny ritualised marks’ she’s found on the body. She says her ‘intuition’ tells her that the murderer is someone very close to the young woman, which is a weird thing for a scientist to say.

‘I don’t think Yin knew the person who took her,’ I say without taking my eyes off the screen. ‘I don’t think it’s anyone we know.’

‘Me neither,’ says Liv.

When the pathologist folds down the sheet covering Emily, Liv shuts the lid of the laptop completely, with a snap. ‘I don’t care if you can take this, I can’t.’

‘Don’t you know it’s make believe?’ I ask her, but she won’t be moved.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asks, but she already knows I don’t.

Liv squishes into bed with me and won’t leave me alone. She makes me draw on her back with a finger, as if we’re still little kids. I hold one of Mum’s old orange paperbacks in my free hand, trying to read and draw at the same time. Liv’s back ribs poke through her pyjama top.

‘You reading that for school?’ Liv throws her head backwards. You can still see the puckered scar at her hairline, from when a German shepherd bit into her ten-year-old head.

I grunt. I can read and back-scratch at the same time, no problem, but talking is too much.

Half of me is in my lamplit bedroom, but the rest of me is hanging out in the English countryside with this posh family called the Mitfords who have a bazillion daughters, each of them more bizarre than the last. Every time my finger stops, my sister twitches to remind me to keep drawing.

‘Tal, you know I’m always here to help you,’ Liv says, out of nowhere. She flips over to face me. ‘I’m crap at keeping in touch, I know, but if you ever want to come over to my flat and hang, or just talk. You can call me any time of night, for any reason. I know what Mum and Dad are like.’

I close the book. Liv’s face is currently twenty centimetres away from mine.

‘I’m okay,’ I tell her and I’m not lying and it’s not the truth either.

No one at school has asked me how I’m doing since it happened. Mum and Dad have, but they don’t count. Maybe no one remembers who I used to be, and I did work hard to make it that way. Junior School is distant enough to seem like a dream.

Liv looks younger close up, all her tattoos and piercings and spikiness blur out at the edges. We’ve got identical eyes, and would have the same colour hair if she didn’t dye hers black.

‘Why do you have to make yourself look so bad, Liv? You could be so pretty.’