Oh, it crossed my mind to go to the police; to turn myself in. But, in my twisted mind, that would be the easy way out; that would assuage my guilt, maybe, but it wouldn’t bring back the girl. Instead, I buried the accident in a compartment deep inside my head and vowed to get on with my life; to live my best life, both for me and for her. But guilt doesn’t like to be bottled up. It’s like a genie. It might lie dormant in its bottle but it moulders and festers inside you, and it grows and it turns into a nugget of shame that eats away at you; and the shame and the horror merge together and become something bigger, something black and toxic that eats you from the inside out, like an army of termites.

You’re too scared to go out, you jump at sirens, you stop driving, you see every accident waiting to happen, you resolve never to have a child of your own because you don’t deserve to be a parent.

You go off to university, and you’re relieved, at first, to get away from home, from the daily reminders of what happened, and you hope you might be able to move on with your life. Oh, how much you have to learn.

In your first term, you learn that this is not something you can outrun. That no matter where you go nor what you do, there’s a huge ball of grief and shame burning inside you. You’re not worthy of being anyone’s friend, you’re not worthy of going to university, of having an education, a life, a boyfriend. You’re not worthy of having any happiness at all.

You lock yourself in your room and obsess about the girl you killed. You spend every waking hour imagining what she’d have been doing if your carelessness hadn’t extinguished her life on a sunny summer evening. You stalk the social media accounts of her friends, and you picture what her life would have been like; you look at the places she would have lived, walked and played. You tear yourself to shreds imagining how her life would have been. And still it’s not enough. A couple of months after you kill a girl, you realize that you face a choice: either you forget her and move forward, or you die yourself.

It wasn’t a cry for help.

Fifty-Seven

‘Albert Road?’ asked the cab driver as we passed the station. It was the first thing either of us had said since I’d told him to drive, and his voice took me by surprise. I looked up to see the familiar shop fronts of the High Street; Mr Ho moving about inside the cosy, pink warmth of his restaurant. Dinners there with Rohan seemed another lifetime.

‘Actually, here’s fine!’ I said suddenly and the driver braked, unsure.