Liz and I adjust our positions so that, between us, we are holding Kira’s near-horizontal body above our heads. Her head lolls on her neck, eyes closed, and her arms dangle at her sides.

Please let her be okay, I repeat over and over in my head. Please, please God, let her be okay.

‘There!’ Caleb shouts and the dressing-gown cord drifts down from the banister and lands on Kira’s chest.

‘Ring nine-nine-nine!’ Liz screams as we lower Kira’s limp body to the carpet, but Caleb already has the phone pressed against his cheek.

‘Ambulance,’ he barks. ‘Number eleven Whitehart Road. Kira Simmons, nineteen. She’s just tried to hang herself. I don’t think she’s breathing.’

Chapter 63

Jake’s face is white as he walks back into the waiting area. We’re back in the hospital after returning home just after eleven last night. None of us has slept.

‘Kira wouldn’t say why she did it,’ Jake says, his voice thick with emotion, as he approaches the plastic chairs where I’m sitting beside Mark. ‘She didn’t say anything. Not a word. She wouldn’t even look at me. I don’t know why she’d do something like that, Mum. I don’t …’ The muscle in his jaw pulses as he stares at the ceiling, fighting back tears.

‘Oh, sweetheart.’ I wrap my arms around him and pull him in to me. There are other families in the waiting area with us. I can feel their eyes on us but I don’t care.

‘I don’t get it.’ Jake gently removes my hands from his shoulders and slumps into a chair beside Mark. ‘I just don’t get it.’

‘She seemed fine.’ My husband sits forward in his seat and rests his forearms on his thighs. ‘I spoke to her yesterday morning and she seemed really excited about the exhibition. She was really quiet when she got back from college, but she so often is …’ He tails off.

Everything happened very quickly when I arrived at A&E in the ambulance with Kira last night. She regained consciousness en route but was groggy and confused when the medic asked her name and whether she was in any pain. She was lying on a stretcher, packed into a vacuum mattress with an oxygen mask over her face. Once at A&E she was wheeled into a booth and immediately seen by a doctor who asked me a series of questions about what I’d seen – how far she’d fallen and how long she was suspended from the banister before the ligature was untied. As I answered he checked her breathing and hooked her up to a heart monitor. Kira passed out as he was attending to her and he shouted something about intubation and asked me to leave the cubicle. That’s when I called Jake.

‘How is she physically?’ Mark asks.