When I passed the kitchen I could hear him wailing still. He was ranting about the wolves and the monsters. ‘There are monsters in my mind, Noora,’ he cried. ‘Controlling. Eating me alive. They did it, not me. They did it. Believe me. Please … believe me.’

I couldn’t bear to listen any more so I stepped away and walked out of the front door. I walked and I walked until I wore myself out and slumped in this little clearing on the far edge of the woods. I feel safe here now, though he’s been out looking for me. I heard him coming that first night and I scarpered into the trees, taking the bag with me, and watched him from my hiding place. He was frantic. Calling my name, not hers, over and over again like a crazed person. But then that’s what he is. Crazed. I realize that now. And if you spend enough time around crazy people, it rubs off. I don’t want to be like him. I want to be normal. I want to be free.

And yet as I write this I can’t help feeling sad for the man he used to be, the loving dad who cherished me for the first ten years of my life. The days before the military training began, the days of The Wind in the Willows, him taking on the voices of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad, me telling him not to stop but to do those voices again and again and again. Life felt safe then. We were living inside a story, so it seemed, a perfect world where nothing bad happened and everything was arranged in neat chapters. But then I turned eleven and it all fell apart.

I can see the book I took from his bedroom. It’s lying on the ground beside me, unopened. I know he’ll be frantic when he sees it’s missing cos there’s not a day gone by when he hasn’t read that book, clutched it in his hands, spoken to it, shouted at it. Once, I even saw him throw it against a wall. It was like the book had a spirit of its own and I could never be sure if that spirit was good or evil. But I knew that it brought out the worst in him. We could have had the most ordinary day, when we’d have gone hunting, say, or baked a batch of bread or cleaned out the chickens, a day when not a cross word passed between us, but as soon as evening came and he picked up that book, everything would change. His face would contort and all the happiness would drain from him like water down a plughole.

So even though I want to see what’s inside, there is a part of me that’s scared to. What if it has the same effect on me as it had on him? What if opening it releases things that can never be put back, like that woman in the story with the box? But if I don’t then he will always be a mystery to me and I don’t want that. I want to find out why he did what he did, why he locked me in that room and tortured me. And I know, deep inside, that the answers lie somewhere in that book.