I want to go back to the hotel and hide, but the day has only just started and I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t face the past. I left not long after Hannah disappeared. I had nothing left to keep me here when that summer ended. I lost everything and everyone I cared about.

Instead of going back to the hotel, I decide to go to a pub and read through the articles there. Not that I want to get drunk, but I definitely need something to take the edge off my nerves. At home I might go for a run alongside the thickets by the lake, but here I don’t much feel like it; I don’t want anyone to notice me and so I would rather hide in a corner with some liquid courage. I don’t drink this much at home; I think it’s being here, in this place. I’m going back in time, becoming the person I used to be, a teenage girl who drank too much and managed to get herself into trouble without even trying. It’s strange how being around certain people or being in certain places can change who you are. When I’m with Chris I am weaker somehow, as though I allow him to be the driven one, the brave one, the one who knows things. I bake cakes and make jewellery, I’m on the Parents, Teachers and Friends Association and my children go to every after-school club going. They do gymnastics, ballet, drama club, chess club, horseback riding and a plethora of other things I can’t even remember. I do yoga, I run and I’m in a book club. I have become a housewife by numbers. I focus on making life comfortable for everyone else. It’s not as though it feels like a sacrifice, but now I am here it seems strange that this is the woman I became. I remember what I used to want for myself when I am here. I did none of it though. I ran away and almost straight into Chris’s arms. It’s not his fault either; he never asked me to be this person. I just tried to be normal. I saw how other mothers behaved and copied them. It’s all just another disguise, another way of pretending the past didn’t happen.

In the pub I read through the stories about Hannah Torrence. See the sensationalist headlines ebb and fade until some other local scandal took its place. It was a long time before they really let it go, though. Memorials and vigils were held, the same faces at every one, the same people interviewed in every article until it was eventually all repeated and regurgitated information.