I pull out the black Sharpie I have tucked down inside the cast and hold it out. ‘You have to write on my cast.’

‘That’s pressure,’ he says, pulling the lid off the pen with his teeth.

He pretends to think and then bends down so he can write along the underside near my knee. I try to read the words upside down, but he covers them with his arm.

When he’s finished, he sits up and hands me back the pen. Now I can finally read what he wrote.

We will always have the world from above.

‘Thanks,’ I say as Maggie comes back into the room with a pot of tea.

‘I’ll grab the cups,’ says Matt.

Maggie and I watch as he leaves the room. Then she slides her hand across the table and squeezes mine. I wait for her to say something, but she doesn’t. She just holds my hand like that is all that’s needed.

‘Can you write on my cast, Maggie?’

‘I always wanted to have a cast when I was a girl. I tried several times to break something, but it never worked.’ She picks the pen up from the table and I wait for her to take the lid off and scribble something. Instead, she leans over and presses her mouth down onto the plaster, marking my grubby, used-to-be-white cast with a red-lipsticked kiss.

‘Ew,’ she says, wiping her mouth. ‘Plaster isn’t very nice to kiss!’

I realise how much I’m going to miss Maggie when I leave here. ‘I’ve finally thought of the right name for my guppy,’ I tell her.

Maggie looks at me, waiting in that way she does.

‘I’m calling it Maggie. Doesn’t matter if it’s a boy fish.’

She takes in a huge breath of air and then nods really fast like she’s bottling everything in.

‘I’ll miss you,’ I tell her, causing her to nod even more.

She starts turning the teapot, three times to the left and then three to the right. ‘You’ll still be my fish-sitter, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Remember there’s always fresh cake on Sundays if you’re around.’

‘Wouldn’t miss it.’

I definitely hear her sniff once after turning away from me and calling out to Matt to hurry up with the cups. I’m sort of relieved she doesn’t cry because then I might start, too.

Chapter 18

There’s a strange bubble of silence in the car. We’ve been parked out the front of our new house for ten minutes and none of us has spoken. Ten minutes might not seem like very long, but actually, when nobody is filling it with words, it’s a painful stretch of time. I expected Dad to crack first, but it’s Mum who opens her door and breaks the quiet.