She’s there in the gap next to me with her perfect hair and perfect cheekbones and her bare feet and her bleeding head, but she won’t answer.

“Talk to me, damn it, talk to me. You’re quick to talk when you want to, aren’t you? Talk to me.”

A car slows, the driver staring as he passes. What does he see? A madwoman yelling at nothing in the middle of a downpour. That’s what I am. Bella hasn’t come back to me. What a stupid bloody idea. I don’t even know who Bella is.

“Enough,” I say, calmer, pushing my sodden hair away from my face. “Enough of this. Go, Bella. Leave me alone. Your death was an accident, that’s all. I have to let you go. I have to get some help and some sleep and let you go.”

Max is waiting for me when I get back to the house. I guess from the look on his face he’s already spoken to Sean. The rain has stopped and he’s sitting on the wooden bench outside the house. I sit beside him, feeling the damp from the wood seep into my jacket.

“I had such a crush on you back then,” I say.

He glances at me. “I know. I knew.”

I wince. “Was it that obvious to everyone?”

“Pretty obvious.” He’s laughing at me.

“Oh God…”

“Listen, Tess—about Bella…”

I put a hand up to stop him from talking. “Don’t. Please don’t. It’s ancient history and it really doesn’t matter. I’m…it’s being back here. Sometimes I feel like I’m sixteen again and then I realize how ridiculous it is to get hurt by something from ten years ago. It’s not like you were my boyfriend, is it?”

The woods loom up behind us but for once I don’t care. There’s no monster in the woods, no monster in Dean House. Bella’s death was an accident, a senseless, pointless accident.

“But I think you should know. I did like you, you know how much I liked you—we were friends. And Bella…” He pauses. “It was just sex.”

“I always thought it was Jack, or even Sean, she was seeing. I honestly never thought it was you.”

“It wasn’t really. It was only a couple of times before the wedding. After…she took me into the woods.”

“The woods?”

“Come on, Tess, I was seventeen. I’d have had sex anywhere.”

I close my eyes and see them, a teenage Max and Bella, walking through the woods together. In my mind, they sink to the floor in the same place she died and, in my mind, he pulls off her shoes first, those battered old white Converse.