I hesitate. Our secret, Bella said to me once. Don’t tell. Bella’s death and Greg’s death, so close together. I don’t want it to have been Greg who killed Bella, but I also don’t want them thinking Bella could have had something to do with Greg’s death, not when she’s not here to defend herself. “No,” I say. “She didn’t know him. Other than as Jack and Sean’s father.

“What about the other deaths?” I say as they get up to leave. “The murdered girls.”

“There was never any evidence linking him or anyone in this area to those murders.” But he pauses before he says it.

When Bella died, when the two of us were found in the woods, the stories appeared all over again, speculation that Bella was the third victim, that I was the survivor. We became front-page news, until the inquest ruled Bella’s death an accident. A drunken mishap, the press then said. Teenagers out of control. It was like they were angry that we weren’t victims of a serial killer, like we’d tried to fool them. So they printed their horrible stories about Bella, and people came forward and whispered lies to them, making Bella and Lena and their friends sound like hell-raisers, making Bella sound like she deserved what happened to her.

All my denials and questions back then, when I refused to accept the Bella painted in the press, when I begged the police to keep investigating, were greeted with sympathy, pity in their eyes as they patiently restated the inquest findings, the amount of alcohol in Bella’s system.

Today, though, it’s not pity I see in their eyes as I ask the same questions. It’s speculation.

I sit in the rotting wooden chair in the middle of the walled garden at Dean House. I’ve been working for two hours and I’ve managed to clear all the weeds.

I’m not free of ghosts. Bella appears and disappears. Greg stands behind me giving instructions. I close my eyes and lift my face to the sun and the world tilts so I have to clutch the splintered arms of the chair to stop myself from falling sideways. But it’s still more peaceful than Dad’s house, too full of Sean and Jack and Dad’s grief, while Julia fades upstairs. I can’t breathe there. Sean was right about the air. It’s been sucked out of the house and what’s left is dry and dead. I have a permanent bad taste in my mouth that only dissipates when I’m here, with my hands deep in damp earth, feeling life begin to grow again.

“Tess?”