And now I am crying. She puts her arms around me and holds me like I knew she would, but also like I don’t think anyone ever has before. Her hair is tickling my face. I can smell the apple scent of it. I can’t stop the tears, so I burrow into her even more.

I don’t know how long we sit there, but eventually my tears slow and I feel my shoulders sag in exhaustion. My breath is still hitching, but I feel composure is within reach. She releases me and I feel the space between us, gaping and open, letting the wind through. I want to close the gap again.

“There, you ok?” she says.

I nod, unsure if I can speak yet. Her arm is around my neck, light, comforting. She reaches out with her other hand and takes hold of mine. I look down, light against dark.

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“You wouldn’t understand. Your family is so lovely and mine is just toxic.”

“My grandfather didn’t speak to my father for years because he married a black woman, so I know a little bit about toxic. Try me.”

And I do, every messy little detail of it, how angry and hurt I feel, how I now hate that house and everything it represents. The house that is rearing up behind me as we talk.

She sits and listens. No one has ever listened to me like that before. No one has given me the time to just talk. When I’m finished, every last word wrung out of me, I wait for the criticism, the judgements, for her to tell me I’m being melodramatic or that other people have a much harder life than me, that I need to put on my big girl pants and get on with my privileged life without complaining.

But she doesn’t. She looks aghast, outraged at what she has heard.

“Wow, I can’t imagine what that must feel like. How betrayed you must feel.” She sits back against the bench, stares out at the snarling sea. “Have you told anyone else about what’s going on?”

“Eloise, you mean? Or Steph and Emily? No, they wouldn’t understand. And we don’t really have that kind of friendship.”

I’m beginning to realise that the friendship I share with them is all falsehoods and pretence, of saying what I’m expected to and creating a carbon copy of each other, not veering off the path of popular conformity, that different is bad.

“I think you should talk to someone.”

“I’m talking to you.”

“I know. It’s just… What about your mother?”