‘There’s this place. Near home.’ He’s still turning, looking up at the trees; it catches at Selena, the way he looks at them like they matter, like he wants to remember every detail. ‘It’s just an old house, Victorian or something, I don’t know. I found it when I was a kid, maybe seven; it was empty, like you could tell it’d been abandoned for ages – holes in the roof, the windows were all broken and boarded up . . . It’s got this big garden, and right in one corner there was a circle of trees. Not the same kind as these – I don’t know what they are, I don’t know that stuff – but still. It reminded me.’

He catches her eye and pulls back into a shrug and a half-laugh. In texts they’ve talked about stuff Selena doesn’t even tell the others, but this is different; they’re so close they make each other’s skin fizz. ‘I mean, I don’t go there now. Someone bought it a couple of years back; they started locking the gates. I climbed up and looked over the wall once, and there were a couple of cars in the drive. I don’t know if they actually live there, or if they did it up, or what. Anyway.’ He heads over to the edge of the clearing and starts poking a foot into the undergrowth. ‘Do animals live in here? Like rabbits or foxes?’

Selena says, ‘Did you go there when you wanted to be on your own?’

Chris turns and looks at her. ‘Yeah,’ he says, after a moment. ‘When things weren’t great at home. Sometimes I’d get up really early, like five in the morning, and I’d go there for a couple of hours. Just to sit there. Out in the garden, if it wasn’t raining, or inside if it was. Then I’d go home, before anyone else was awake, and get back into bed. They never even knew I was gone.’

In that instant it’s him, the same guy whose texts she’s cupped in her hands like fireflies. He says, ‘I never told anyone that before.’ He’s smiling at her, half-startled, half-shy.

Selena wants to smile back and tell him how she and the others come to the glade, in exchange, but she can’t; not till she’s cleared away the thing pinching at her. She says, ‘The phone. The one you gave me.’

‘You like it?’ But he’s looked away again. He’s peering back under the cypresses, even though there’s no way he could see into that dark. ‘There could even be badgers in here.’

‘Alison Muldoon’s got one exactly the same. So’s Aileen Russell, in fourth year. So’s Claire McIntyre.’