A silence fell across the room then. The sounds of next door’s television bled through the wall; the tinny strains of Casualty.

‘Shit,’ I said, after a few moments more. ‘I can’t believe you’ve never told me any of this stuff before, Anya. Why? Why the hell haven’t you?’

‘Oh Ell …’ Anya wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘When could I tell you? What would have been a good moment to share all this?’

‘I don’t fucking know!’

Anya curled herself up into the chair, face pressed into a blue fluffy cushion she’d had since she was a girl, when it was in her bedroom.

‘It must be nice to be so perfect,’ she said, her voice muffled by new tears and the soft fabric of the cushion. ‘Never doing anything wrong.’

‘I’m not perfect by a long way,’ I said quietly.

‘Oh no?’ she said, looking up, her voice harsh. ‘I’m not sure you know what it feels like to be eaten up by guilt. It’s like having something corrode away at your insides. It’s like, it’s like …’ she started to cry again. ‘It’s like cancer.’

‘I know exactly what that’s like.’ A pause. ‘There are things you don’t know about me. We all have regrets.’

Was this it? The time when I shared what had happened to Mrs Mack? It seemed so.

I found myself letting it out. I told her in just a few sentences about my friendship with the old lady, my tantrum, my betrayal. Funny how it could be expressed in a handful of sentences in the end, this bag of pain that I had carried like a dead weight for all these years.

That expression was back, the unreadable one. She had stopped crying and seemed very calm now.

Was she disgusted? I found that I couldn’t meet her gaze so I looked down at my hands until she broke the silence.

‘I guess we both had things to hide from each other, didn’t we?’ was all that she said.

I don’t think I had ever felt so exhausted as I did right then. I laid my head back against the sofa and closed my eyes.

‘No more secrets?’ I said quietly.

‘Well …’

My eyes were instantly open again, a charge of new worry snapping in my spine. But for the first time in what seemed ages, she was smiling at me, a languid, untroubled smile that surprised me.

‘There is just one more,’ she said. ‘It’s what I’ve wanted to tell you since I got in. But then we got side-tracked by all this shit.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Tell me what?’

‘I’m pregnant, Ell. I’m actually pregnant.’

ELLIOTT

This is where I want to slow right down.