I cross the room and stand in front of the large stone fireplace. Above it is the picture Mum left to Georgie. It’s a print by an artist named John Atkinson Grimshaw and depicts a cobbled street bathed in moonlight. It’s winter, the trees are bare, the street deserted save for one solitary walker. The only light comes from the moon, peeking through the trees, and from the windows of a beautiful house on the edge of the picture. The house, partly hidden behind the trees, has tall brick chimneys with wisps of smoke rising out and narrow windows behind which glows a warm and golden light. Mum used to say the painting, titled A Moonlit Road, should have been called Coming Home because that’s how it always made her feel.

I stand for a moment and look up at the painting, my eyes drawn to the figure on the pavement. I’d barely noticed the picture when I was a child, though I knew Mum loved it. She had hung it in her bedroom, on the wall opposite the bed. She liked to look at it before going to sleep, said it soothed her.

I think back to that terrible moment in the eco house when the estate agent caught me trying to steal an original Grimshaw painting, which would have been worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, and I cringe inwardly. Yet, as I stand here, I realize I have become the figure in the painting, cast out on the street, looking longingly at a warm and inviting home that will never be mine. I thought Connor was my home. I thought that he loved me. I see that image again, Sara’s hands clutching his back, the noises they were making, and it hurts so much I almost lose my breath.

‘Nessa, what is it? What’s happened?’

I turn to see Georgie standing in the doorway. Her black hair is scooped back into a messy ponytail and she’s wearing Jack’s blue dressing gown, which is at least three sizes too big for her. My sister has always borne more resemblance to my dad, yet tonight the expression on Georgie’s face is so like Mum I start to cry.

‘Oh, darling, what is it?’ she says, rushing towards me and pulling me to her chest. ‘What’s the matter?’

I want to tell her about Connor and Sara, about his mother and the abortion, about the night of the burlesque, those lost hours. I want to take all my fear and panic and pain and pour it out at the feet of my older, wiser sister, but I don’t have the words to even begin. She’ll be so disappointed in me for not telling her. For letting it get to this.

‘Is it Connor?’ she says. ‘Have you two had an argument?’