“So it was like an unconscious manipulation,” I said. “To get people to look after her.”

Jessica shook her head. “No! She never let anyone raise a finger for her. She was a woman of our mothers’ generation, you know? The grin-and-bear-it generation, the women who were raised not to cause a ruckus. So she just kept her feelings inside and compulsively bashed the crap out of herself whenever something made her feel bad. It was a pathology.”

“I don’t do that,” I said after a moment.

“What you do is worse,” said Jessica. “You stand there as the roof is falling in, and when the pieces land on your head you’re like, Oh well — serves me right for letting the roof fall in, I guess.”

I decided not to let this hurt my feelings. “Ok, but I’m not like that anymore. I know I was stuck in that house for a while —”

“I’m not talking about the house,” said Jessica.

“— but I’m moving forward now,” I insisted.

“You keep giving him all this leeway,” said Jessica.

“No,” I said, becoming defensive. “It was my mother. My mother’s the one who gave him all the leeway. I took my cues from her —”

I broke off, sounding whiny even to my own ears. I wasn’t just arguing with Jessica anymore. I was arguing with the droning voice in my head that had been low-key jeering at me ever since I talked to Noel. Right now it was saying: But you didn’t actually take your cues from Irene, did you? You took your cues from someone else, a stranger. Someone who told you stories of Irene. Which you decided, for some reason, to believe.

“Did it ever occur to you,” said Jessica, “Trevor might’ve been the one who called Adult Protection on you?”

I kept my face neutral. It felt a little awkward broaching this topic because I’d thought we’d both basically accepted the idea that it had been Jessica’s — let’s face it — meddling that had led to Eleanor Mallon arriving at my doorstep.

“It wouldn’t make sense for him to do that,” I said at length.

“If he got Finny to scare you in the parking lot, it would,” said Jessica. “If he did that, what wouldn’t he do to scare you? He’d do anything.”

“But why would he want to scare us? He loves — Kelli. He loved my mother.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” yelled Jessica, causing the surrounding keyboard-peckers to glance over from their screens in one synchronized motion, as if choreographed. “Love is the excuse these people use! Love is what they use!”

I marvelled at how different Jessica seemed in that moment. She grimaced and rolled her eyes in an almost teenage way, raking her fingers through her hair and causing her normally impeccable strands to stand up at cockeyed angles. It threw me to see Jessica Hendy so abruptly mussed and upset. In that moment I only wanted to calm her, drain the tension from the conversation so we could get back to the business of being friends.