The next day, the chaos of pre-wedding planning and the relentless heat has chased us into the woods. It’s only supposed to be a small wedding—the ceremony at the town hall, followed by a reception at home. But it keeps getting bigger and bigger, ten people becoming twenty becoming forty. Now there are four crates of champagne filling the kitchen and the plan for sandwiches and homemade sausage rolls has become a formally catered buffet. None of our moods are helped by the onset of a heatwave. Instead of lying around in the shade, the four of us were sweating as we carried hired chairs and glasses in and out of rooms, Jack and Sean nowhere to be bloody found. After Bella lost her temper over a dropped glass, Dad told us to take a break.

We haven’t come to the woods, just the two of us, for such a long time. The sun filters through the trees, making the light stripes of green and gold. It’s warm on my skin and I’m only wearing a T-shirt and shorts, my freckled knees dappled with bruises from banging them on the stacks of chairs we’ve been ferrying about. Bella sits next to me on a log, throwing stones into the almost dried-up stream. Her own legs in cut-off denim shorts are long and brown, smooth and freckle-free. But she’s gotten too thin. When did she get so thin and drawn-looking?

The stream smells stagnant, mud and rotting leaves and God knows what else sluggishly floating downstream. The smell coats the inside of my nose like something corporeal and I know it’ll linger there long after we get up and go home. Bella has the old camera next to her, the one Greg gave her.

“You have to stop going there,” I say.

“Going where?”

“To see him. Greg.”

Bella laughs. “What—are you my mother now, giving me orders?”

“You told me not to go there.”

She glances at me, a frown on her face. “That’s different. I can look after myself.”

“What—and you think I can’t? I’m sixteen, not six.”

There’s a long pause and I watch Bella dropping stones, a faraway look on her face.

“Tess? Did he ever touch you?”

My face goes hot. I can feel the sweat leaking through my T-shirt. “Touch me?”

“Touch you—hurt you?”

“Bloody hell, Bella—shut up!”

The squirming distaste her words elicit is as stagnant and rotten as the stream. Her words put that ugliness inside me. What I’m remembering is me lurching toward him, trying to kiss him. God. Greg Lewis. It’s her fault—her fault for telling me Max only saw me as a sister, making me humiliate myself trying to prove her wrong.

“God, of course not. Ugh, I can’t believe you’d—”

“He tried to kiss me.”