I looked past Cory, to the window and the straggly shadows of the woods. Tom would be wondering where I’d got to; he might even come inside and start searching. I listened for the distant creak of doors, hesitant footsteps, and the calling of my name, but the house was silent. This is how it would sound if Tom were to give up and drive away.

“I’d better go,” I said, but I was only testing the words to see if they rang true. I got to my feet and Diana whispered in her sleep.

“You can’t,” said Cory, springing up beside me. “You can’t go back to all that.”

All what? I wondered about his talk with my dad, and the things he must have gleaned, and for a moment I was offended. My life wasn’t that bad, was it? In the next breath I loved him for seeing, and saying, the truth.

I looked at his outstretched hand, although I didn’t take it yet. The house seemed to be holding its breath and listening for my reply. Even the huddled trees looked as though they were eavesdropping at the window. Diana lay still with her eyes closed and her fingers in a tight fist.

Cory waited too, and when I didn’t answer he kissed me on the lips.

It had been four years and ten months since my last kiss. His name had been Dan and he’d had brown hair, and I couldn’t remember anything else about him except that we’d met in freshers’ week, and he was going to read English, like me. We’d kissed for the first and last time the day before Stella’s body was found; a few hours before the phone call came and I left university. It hadn’t been a successful kiss—we were both rather gauche, and our teeth had clashed—but I’d thought, at the time, that it marked the start of everything.

Cory’s kiss felt like the start of everything, too, but unlike last time—unlike poor Dan—this was good and real. Our teeth did not clash. Cory’s kiss was all that a kiss should be; it was all that a beginning should be.

“Will you stay? Just for a little while.” Cory’s whisper ran over my face, passing softly across my eyes and lips, tickling my ear, and stirring my hair. “Please stay.”

Sometimes, even now, I dream about that kiss. Cory and I are always in a dark bedroom, and the air is quivering with electrical heat, and I can’t fill my lungs properly. Nothing is certain. I never know whether the trees are inside the window or out; whether I’m being propped up or pushed down; whether I’m suffocating or coming to life.