At that point there was a commotion, and someone cried out – Karen, I think. I don’t know why. She didn’t know Martha all that well, none of us did. She was first-tier, we were second. Even in such a small college there were strata, rules, cliques. I followed Karen’s gaze, all the way through the lodge, through the gate to the Fellows’ Garden, which had just swung open. There were two male paramedics there, one young with a beard, one older with grey hair. A woman paramedic knelt beside them. They were working on something. A huddled heap. As they moved, from a distance, I saw something in my line of vision – a small white hand, which was already beginning to smudge with bruises. A woman’s hand. A woman who was clearly dead. A flash of white silk, stained with dirt. And nothing was ever the same again.

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-One

Here’s what my life had become. My husband was in the intensive care ward of the hospital, clinging to life. And my daughter was in the psychiatric ward of the same building, having had her stomach pumped after my mother found her slumped in her bedroom, a packet of tranquillisers scattered beside her. The same ones my mother had been taking for most of my childhood. The ones that made it easier to turn a blind eye to what our home had become. There would be time for that later, to blame myself for leaving her with my kids, for not seeing anything sinister in the fact Cassie wouldn’t leave the house or get dressed or shower. That she’d stopped even going online, so toxic had her life become. And it had poisoned her.

They told me she’d be alright. That she hadn’t taken enough to do permanent liver damage – the irony of it, as if trying to destroy the organ she couldn’t give to her father – that once she stopped throwing up black-coloured bile and grew a little stronger she could go home. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? She’d tried to kill herself.