Unseasonably cold even for November and I hadn’t brought a jacket. After a five-minute walk, which isn’t negligible when one is a child who can no longer see the house poking from between the trees, Celeste said we were to play hide-and-seek, and I needed to spin and count at the same time, all the way up to thirty. I closed my eyes, counted, shuffled my feet. It took eleven seconds of counting but I realized what had happened, what I had fallen for, but by this point I’d already spun, and opening my eyes gave me no more insight than I would have had while they were shut.

The woods weren’t big. An acre at most. I could have walked in any direction, emerged into open suburbia and I would have found my way back to the house – but I was a child and I couldn’t move. That was the first time in my life I remember feeling raw, jagged panic, the bone-hollowing sort that teaches how easily one can slip into suffering over things you once used to enjoy; the smell of the forest, the rustle of leaves in wind. Of course I didn’t know this at the time. Or couldn’t articulate it, at least.

Trees became looming, malevolent beasts. I gripped on to one of them while the world spun. Only recognized the true icy-coldness of my baby skin once the warmth trickled down my leg and pooled.

I don’t know how long I stayed there for. I just know that by the time Dad came looking for me it was night-time and my hands were dripping with blood from gripping so hard on to the bark.

‘What were you doing out here, my girl?’ Dad asked.

What was I doing out here, Celeste? What was I?

Celeste came with him and after Dad held me up to his chest to carry me back to the house, all precious and doting, she lingered behind to create an unbreakable line of sight between us. Tell and you die, she mouthed.

Even on the walk back I felt I was different.

I still have scars on my hands. They’re not the only ones.

Just after my ninth birthday. ‘I hate that mole on your face,’ she said, unprompted. ‘Ugly. Like a witch.’