My mother is asleep, the rattling penny back in her throat. Watching her soothes me. The lines of pain are smoothed into something approaching peace. She looks younger. More like my mother than she has done for weeks.

The same cannot be said of my father. He’s supposed to be taking care of her, but he’s asleep too, his snores drowning out the sound of the rain. Three beer cans sit on the cabinet-cum-table now, and the room smells of the pub and an underwash of something sickly sweet.

‘Dad?’ I say, but he doesn’t stir.

A line of drool is escaping from his mouth and down his chin. Something red and smudged marks his cheek.

Maureen Connolly wears red lipstick.

The rain hammers down and I stand in my mother’s room, and I remember what kind of woman she is. Her kindness. The way she listens. Her empathy. The importance she places on doing the right thing.

I think about Shannon, about that look on her face at the disco, all the broken parts of her. About comfort and friendship. About being there for someone when they need you, even when it’s difficult. Especially when it’s difficult.

And I make a choice.

I press my lips to my mother’s cheek. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

The rain is cold and there’s too much of it. It streams into my eyes and down the back of my coat, and there’s a hole in my shoes, making my feet wet.

Hilltop House is in darkness, but I know where I’m going because I’ve been there so many times before.

I crawl through the hole in our fence and push through the shrubs and bushes until I find myself in next door’s garden, but I keep to the dark edges to avoid the security lights.

There it is: the garage.

The trellis that clings to the side acts like a ladder, and I’m halfway up, feeling for footholds with my toes, before it occurs to me to that Shannon’s window might be closed now. I glance upwards. It is.

I climb back down, cursing my stupidity, and grub in the dirt for a stone to throw at her window, but my aim is off, and it clatters against the guttering. The rain blinds me. Go home, Brinley.

The patio is wet and slippery, and I shelter under the lip of the conservatory while I decide what to do next, my trainers nosing against a metal foot scraper, pushed into the wall, close to the door.

The Carter family keep their spare key there. Shannon showed me last summer, when we’d come back here after school one day and she’d forgotten hers.

Absolutely not.

This is not my house. It would be wrong in a hundred different ways. Intrusive. Illicit. I can’t just let myself in without permission.

Can I?