I didn’t have the courage to tell my mother what had happened on the cliff, or what Tim had discovered about my father. I had parked the car on the drive and looked through the window at my mother leaning over the sink, a concerned look on her face. She looked so vulnerable and I just couldn’t face her and tell her what I had done. She was alone, waiting for my father to come home, waiting for me to come home. But we never did.

My guilt about what happened that summer is too much for me to bear. I have suppressed it for years but now, looking at the front door, I can feel it as strongly as I did back then.

I hear the sound of stairs creaking and even the footsteps sound familiar, as though everyone comes down the stairs in their own way and this way was my mother’s.

‘Jasmine?’ she says, as she is standing in front of me, blinking back tears. I can tell she wants to hug me, but I don’t want that. She looks behind me to check I am alone.

‘Hello, Mother,’ I reply, balking at the sound of my own name. A name I haven’t used for more than half of my life.

‘I didn’t know if I would ever see you again.’

‘Well, here I am.’ It comes out more harshly than I’d intended. I’m not as happy to see her as I should be. Just being here makes me feel sixteen again, makes me feel like that girl who was told lie upon lie upon lie. The girl I had to bury, and the friend I never got to.

‘Look at you. Look at your hair,’ she says, reaching forward to touch it. I pull back before she can. I hadn’t realised before now how angry I would be with her. I can feel my heart thumping, and what I mistook for fear as I approached my old home has now shown itself as rage. I wish this house didn’t exist anymore. I look at my mother and wish there was nothing left of my old life. Nothing. She looks old. She is wearing clothes that I remember, faded and tatty but still quintessentially her. Her hair is grey and unkempt. Her skin has lost that glow it used to have and now looks off-colour in some way. It’s like everything stopped when I left, like my mother stopped living. I want to feel guilt, but I can’t. A part of me is glad that she has suffered, still angry at her for marrying my father, for making me a part of this awful family.

‘Did you send me the note?’ I ask.