When I stumbled into their bedroom on that wet spring night, Mrs Carter was still alive. Bleeding heavily, yes, but she was breathing. I could have helped her. I should have done. Called an ambulance. The police. Tried to staunch the flow of blood.

Instead I picked up a pillow and pressed it over her face until she was completely still.

In my bleakest moments of regret, I tell myself she would not have survived. Blood loss would have killed her in the end. But I don’t know that. I will never know.

Pearline and the women from church scrubbed Aunt Peg’s blood from the hallway carpet while I cried out my grief in a hospital bed. They filled my fridge with spicy stews and clingfilmed bowls of coconut rice and beans. Told me stories of Nine Night, the Jamaican tradition of celebrating the dead with rum and food on the ninth night of their passing. But their love and warmth only reminds me I have lost both my mothers now.

Pamela Carter had seen me. She had known what Shannon had done to her, what Sara hadn’t. Like me, Mrs Carter was a witness. Her survival was to risk her telling the police everything. I had to choose a sister to save.

When she was dead, I turned round and Shannon was standing there, framed in the bedroom door. A look of complicity arced between us. If I told the police what Shannon had done, she would tell on me. Tit for tat. A deal with the devil’s daughter.

Both of us allowed Sara to shoulder the blame to save ourselves.

That guilt has soaked into every minute of my life. Not for killing Mrs Carter – she reaped what she had sown – but for what it did to the youngest Carter sister.

And now, to me. My act of murder has, finally, exacted its terrible price.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I chose to save Shannon. Because of that, Aunt Peg is dead.

This knowledge stains every breath, every pump and beat of my heart, every sunrise and sunset, every human touch. It pollutes my dreams, smears itself across my future, and the weight of my sorrow drives me into the dirt. There are no winners here. For all the malignancies that tainted her, Shannon was a victim too.

Rain streaks the window. I stand alone in the midnight stillness of my aunt’s flat, overlooking this city of mine. Across the blackened smudge of the horizon, a vast spark of lightning illuminates the sky.

One-one-thousand.

Two-one-thousand.

Three-one-thousand.

A groan of thunder. The lights go out. I fumble in the drawer for a candle and matches. Power outages are not uncommon on this estate, but it’s the first time in years the weather’s been to blame. In a minute, I will check on Pearline.