There was a captivating light about Diana when she smiled in pleasure, like the day Lydia gave her the keys. The whole room was illuminated by her smile. However, she’d also seen that light fade rapidly when Diana didn’t get what she wanted. There was a darkness to her too, like a light switch flicking on and off. She could be morose and melodramatic, wallowing in deep emotional outbursts when she declared the world was against her, that Lydia was drifting away from her, that she wasn’t worthy of the pureness that was in Lydia. And Lydia would do anything to lift the black cloud. There was a lot that Diana didn’t talk about or explain when the curtain fell. Lydia suspected there was more going on at home than Diana would admit and Lydia wanted to be her person, the one who made her feel better, the one she couldn’t live without.

Then Diana had told her that she had found something disturbing when she had been looking for a pen in the shop one evening. Something that would expose the real Helen, she had said, pull back Helen’s mask to reveal the side that no one else knew about. She had said that their family was in real danger.

Lydia felt alive. Not scared or worried, but like every nerve was tingling inside of her, firing her up. Someone needed her. Someone had asked for her help. Someone had confided in her. Diana had chosen her out of everyone else – not Matt, her dad or even Mills.

Those bitches at school were wrong. She wasn’t weak and pathetic after all. When they had started teasing her because she didn’t want to go out and drink vodka straight from the bottle on the beach with random boys every night, she had shrugged it off. Then they stopped inviting her, which was actually a relief. But it soon escalated into more than just teasing. It became a consistent, stinging attack for her lack of interest in the make-up they wanted to wear, the short skirts and tight clothes, the need to prove they were cool by vaping and lacing their Lucozade with enough alcohol to make them pass out. She had stood her ground, put some distance between herself and them, tried to drown it all out, but when they noticed her lack of interest in boys altogether, the attack became all-out warfare, a bombardment of abuse across messaging groups and Snapchat private stories, notes in her locker and sniggered comments in the corridors as she walked past. She could’ve probably ignored all of that too, except that she was uncomfortable in the knowledge that they were poking at a newly discovered and exposed nerve.