My heart speeds up as we reach the outskirts of West Dean. Everything looks the same—the shop, the pub, the dilapidated kids’ playground. It’s like time has stood still, everyone and everything locked in an enchanted sleep in the years I’ve lived away in a city that grows and changes by the day. People stop and stare as Max’s car passes and I swear I can hear whispered observations filtering in through the closed windows. There she is, back at last, took her time, didn’t she? It feels like they’re swirling all around me, closing in. Wonder what happened. The sister who lived. My head is spinning. Wonder what really happened in the woods?

“Stop!” I yell to Max, and almost fall out of the car before throwing up on the grass verge. It feels like everything I’ve eaten in the last month comes up and I stay leaning over, my legs shaking, waiting for the black spots to stop floating in front of my eyes.

“You all right, Tess?”

I can hear the concern in Max’s voice. I straighten up and try on a smile.

“Fine. I’m fine. Something I ate, that’s all.”

He nods, but the frown of concern doesn’t go as I get back in. I lean back and close my eyes, taking shallow breaths as my stomach continues to somersault.

The world is getting weird as I feel myself drift—stretching out and warping, a crap song on the radio merging into Bella singing in the garden, wind whistling in through the window becoming footsteps crunching through the woods. Bella and me and Max and Lena, hide-and-seek among the twisted trees. Then there’s Sean and my eyes fly open and there’s a house in the road, white and crumbling with black staring windows like eyes, and we’re heading straight for it. I almost lurch sideways, almost try for the steering wheel to steer us away when it blinks back out and it’s just the empty road out of the village again, nothing in front of us but a tractor, slowing us to a crawl.

My eyelids feel weighed down. Something heavy sits on them and they keep drifting closed. The car stops and it pulls me out of a half-sleep. It takes me a minute, because I think sleep has carried me here and this is a dream. We’re outside my old house with the ivy and the peeling paint and the broken gate. I expect to see Bella at the upstairs window, Dad in the garden. Maybe even Mum, if this is a way-back dream. Me, seven again, with my mum still around, tall and curly before she got sick, looking just like me.