In an instant, my strange sadness turned to hate and anger. It felt pure as it ran through me, cold as ice in my veins, like the brown stuff was in theirs.

Him.

It had always been him who was to blame.

I looked around the room, my eyes landing on their paraphernalia. Why had this happened now? Despite what people thought, it was difficult to overdose from heroin if you were a long-term continuous user. Something must have happened. Had they mixed it with alcohol or another drug? I could ask him, I supposed, but I’d never get the truth.

‘Stay there,’ I instructed him.

He looked resigned, weary and shattered as he leaned back on the pillow.

Downstairs, I moved around the kitchen. I touched nothing but looked carefully at the boxes and bowls and needles that covered the worktop.

I peered closely at a box. Fentanyl. I knew about this. I’d read an article only last week about heroin users in Glasgow dropping dead after using this opioid painkiller to cut their powder.

I looked in the dining room. I recalled the time I had orchestrated the meeting between my teacher and my mother, and the hope that had bloomed in me when I realised how close I was to getting out. Mum had been proud of me, and had tried to behave and present herself as a normal mother living in a clean and tidy house. All under my instruction. Then there was the deceit. The words I had spoken to Miss Hayle about Rebecca Lavery, my scholarship competitor. My lie had been bad and wrong, and though I had justified it for my own means, was this my punishment?

Outside, the garden seemed lighter than normal. I glanced up and a smile almost reached my face at the sight of the white and blue tail in the sky. The Hale-Bopp comet. We had been taught about it in school, a full year before it arrived in the sky visible to our naked eyes. I had loved hearing about it; it was even better the few times I had seen it. One night, Carl had come to find out why I was in the garden so late. I told him about the comet as I strained to see it through the clouds. For a moment we observed it in silence, and I wondered if it could be a starting point for the two of us.

Seconds later, he broke the companionable silence with a laugh, a rasping, wheezing sound. Then he told me about a group in America called Heaven’s Gate. Thirty-nine people had believed that the Hale-Bopp was actually a UFO; they had killed themselves in a mass suicide, believing their souls would enter the craft as a direct link to God.

He sneered as he left me in the dark of the garden. I sat for a little while longer before returning inside.