Taking one last look at the sleeping woman, exquisite despite her ungainly coma, Sarah considered, just for a moment, how beautiful she had always found Veronica. She didn’t know why she thought about this, and uncharacteristically, she didn’t want to unpack it. Likewise, she didn’t know if she truly believed Veronica’s supposed jealousies, or if she would ever attempt to discover the reasons for them, or care. In that moment, all she knew, with a certainty that felt like epiphany, was that despite the compelling, wild freedom of Veronica and others like her, Sarah had never been, and wasn’t, and didn’t actually, in fact, want to be a meanderer.

Veronica slept, and Sarah stood there wondering why it had taken so many years to come to this realisation. Maybe it was the maturity of motherhood, or that oft-touted confidence one was supposed to achieve in one’s thirties. Maybe it was ‘closure’. Maybe it was seeing Veronica’s own struggles. Whatever it was, Sarah was glad she had realised it, glad she had, in the end, remained true to herself. Everything she had so far done was still un-doable, the sedatives would wear off, she hadn’t taken a photo, there was no real damage, no real consequence. And if Veronica continued to sabotage Amelia’s prospects, Sarah could fight that, she would fight that, she would protect her child. She was the strong one after all.

She let the peacefulness of this new comprehension wash over her. Then steadily, she turned. Quietly, she made her way towards the front door. Serenely, she opened it.

But almost at once, the door to the neighbours’ house flew open next to her, shattering the calm, and a man staggered out onto the street. The same man she had seen the day before, hooded in the rain. Wildly, he glanced up and down the road, veering into the way of cars. “Simone!” he yelled. “Simone! Simone!”

Though nothing to do with her, Sarah felt herself tense at this man’s madness. He was blocking her path, but she couldn’t go back inside, it was nearly eleven and George would be home soon. Besides, she told herself, look: a little way up the road was a woman walking alone; in the other direction a boy, no more than ten. It was perfectly safe. Trouble was behind her only. One last time, Sarah channelled the woman slumped against cushions, gave the man a withering, Veronica-empowered stare, and then left, quickly, decisively, without further collection, letting the front door bang shut.

Veronica

Sirens fought through her grogginess. Then hospital lights and the sound of George at her side.

There were four separate calls, Veronica was told afterwards, as though this would somehow mitigate the fact that they, the police, had still arrived too late. They were understaffed, they’d protested to a vehement George standing soldier in her hospital room, his guard sturdier than theirs, or so he needed to prove. But even when he finally let them through, she couldn’t tell them what they wanted to know: how she had come to be so comatose, what he had done. They wanted it first-hand, from her, but it was clear that both of the officers in the room had concluded their truth already – the man tiptoeing around it, the woman’s face full of pity. They’d been told in fact four separate times from four individuals who had seen it: Terry entering her house through an open door.