Astrid said that after Zadie moved back home she had gone travelling. Tried a term at art school but dropped out when a teacher said something crushing about her work. Then it had been yoga, more travelling, a whirlwind marriage with someone she met in Bali who turned out, to no one’s surprise, to be a complete shit. She’d painted intermittently. Moved back home, moved out, moved back home again. And as she’d got older and all her good-time friends found the straight and narrow, she had become sadder. Every failure seemed to leave her more bruised and more delicate.

Chloe had found herself pouring with silent tears as Astrid described how Zadie had moved back home for the last time three years ago. Only then, she rarely left. She had a dog she adored, a puppy she’d adopted from the streets on one of her travels. She liked the gardens, and being outside. But according to Astrid, Zadie had found less and less that she could bear, and towards the end she spent most of her time walking alone in the countryside or in her childhood bedroom, painting. Astrid had told Chloe she was welcome to visit, to come and see the family. She had apologized for allowing Zadie to disappear so comprehensively. ‘I thought it was what she needed,’ she had said on the phone. ‘I wanted to make things easier for her. But I’m not sure anyone could have done.’

Astrid believed, rightly or wrongly, that Zadie wasn’t a person who could live in the world, at least not like her siblings and her friends could. ‘Life was such a battle for her,’ she had said. It sounded as if her death had come as absolutely no surprise. Zadie had taken an overdose in the woods, left an uncharacteristically short letter for her family, apologized for hurting them, but explained she had nothing left in her any more.

Finally, Chloe had told Astrid she was sorry. Sorry for pretending that Zadie was living in their shared room, sorry for everything she did or didn’t do. She told her she was horrified by what had happened to her at Max’s party. She had wanted to confess about Rav and Max and everything that had happened in the previous months. But that wasn’t for Astrid to contend with. She already had plenty of weights strung around her neck.

‘Darling girl,’ Astrid had said before they finished the conversation, ‘Zadie was like this for as long as I can remember. What happened to her was awful, but it’s not why she ended up the way she did. That was written in the stars for her from day one, I am afraid. I could tell from when she was a little girl that something about her was different. That life was going to be harder for her than it was for other people.’