‘Beth,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘Come on now …’

‘Why are you denying it?’ I asked. ‘We could get her help. We could get us help.’

‘So, what – you want her committed?’ he replied, his distress adding a harsh angry edge to his voice. ‘Locked up? Are you saying she’s – what? – some sort of future serial killer? Is that it?’

‘No! No of course I’m not saying that. I’m as scared as you are. I love Hannah! But I know there’s something badly wrong with our little girl, and we need to get her help as soon as possible. I know you’re frightened, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t love her. And what – what if she hurts Toby?’

He looked away. ‘That shrink we took her to before, he said there was nothing wrong with her.’

‘He said she was too young to make a diagnosis.’

‘Christ.’ He got up and paced around the room, coming to a stop by the window, where he stood looking out in silence. When he finally spoke his voice was tight and strange. ‘If this is true, if you’re right … what if they take her away from us, Beth? What if they say we can’t look after her properly, that it’s our fault she’s the way she is?’

‘She’s getting worse, Doug,’ I said gently. ‘She needs help. We all do.’

He nodded, and I held my breath while he continued to stare out of the window. ‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘OK. Let’s try to get her another referral.’ He glanced at me. ‘As long as it’s not with that berk in Peterborough.’

He smiled sadly at me then, something he hadn’t done, it seemed to me, for a long time, and I could have cried with relief. And I think it was that rare moment of closeness that moved me to say what I said next, to bring up something from years before, that we’d both promised never to mention again. ‘I want to talk about what happened, Doug,’ I blurted. ‘About what we did.’

He knew instantly what I meant, and he became very still. My words hung in the air between us. ‘Look, Beth,’ he said at last, ‘I can’t deal with this now …’

‘Please, Doug,’ I begged. ‘Just let me talk about it. I need to. I think about it all the time, don’t you? I wake up with it on my mind, the lies we told, that girl’s poor family …’

His voice was sharp. ‘Beth, that’s all in the past. We agreed—’

‘But, what we did was wrong. It was so wrong, we should never have—’

He glanced at me and the sudden coldness in his eyes stopped me in my tracks. ‘You wanted to do it. And we have to live with that now.’