After they’d gone, Mum gripped me by both shoulders and sank down to my level on the floor. ‘Alfie, I want you to take deep breaths and stay calm. They have no right to come here with such ridiculous and dangerous accus-ations, when you’re the one who discovered the fire and raised the alarm. We’re going to sort this out, but you just have to believe that it’s all going to be fine. There’s been a stupid mistake.’ She trembled. Her face was the palest I’ve ever seen it, and her eyes were furious.

Horrible, awful waves of terror covered me completely, and I started to sob.

And then Lily was on me and at me, fussing and flapping and jabbering endless words that blended into all the other sounds I could hear – the washing machine whirring and Mum on the phone and my heart still hammering in my ears. It took a while for me to come out of my shock and actually listen to her.

‘I was accused of something I didn’t do too,’ she was saying. ‘It was at a sleepover. Someone’s mum’s diamond earrings went missing … and – and … the day before it happened, I’d been trying them on. My friends believed the bullies.’

Her words went round and round my head. Some slid out.

‘Suddenly, just like that, they … totally believed them – not me at all. After all those horrible months of nastiness, after everything the bullies did to me. And then I found one of the earrings outside where it’d been dropped – they were probably lost, not stolen.’ She stopped to take a long, shuddery breath. ‘It was just next to the family car. It was raining and everything was soaking, and … the diamonds in it were … They shone so brightly through the rain! They still glitter in my nightmares. You couldn’t miss them – nobody could!’ She began to gabble faster. I could hardly tell what she was saying. ‘I left the earring there. Had to. Just went home. In all that rain. I knew if I picked it up and took it to her mum, they’d all think I was trying to return it, trying to pretend the other one was still lost. Because I’d found it, you see. Already, nobody believed me.’

So this was her awful secret. This was what they’d said about her, these were the words too bad to say aloud, even to Mum, for ages. Diamonds, tears, rain.

‘Then it got on to social media and now I was this great big thief. Not the first time, they wrote. How clever is that? And s-someone made a cartoon of me –’ she took another big breath – ‘wearing the earrings … and so the bullies won.’