She stood up and put an arm around Honor’s shoulder. ‘Is there something on your mind, love? You can talk to me about anything, you know. I promise I won’t get cross. The doctor said stress or worry can trigger—’

‘I’m fine.’ Her rebuttal was clipped and impatient. She shook off her mother’s concern and left the kitchen, breakfast uneaten.

Not for the first time, Catherine wondered if lying about her daughter’s nocturnal disturbances might make for a quieter life. But while Honor’s friends were still inviting her for sleepovers and Catherine was persuading her to decline, the girl deserved the facts.

Although she had lied about so many things, Catherine refused to airbrush the truth about what happened to Honor during the night. Protecting her daughter was her primary motivation. She’d been doing it since she was born.

Despite her claims to the contrary, Catherine knew Honor would rather die than risk exposing herself to ridicule by the alpha girls in her class, who were the head-tilting, shiny ponytailed, insincere types. Her mother didn’t blame her. Catherine had extensive experience of her own with girls like that.

Mostly, it began with the scratching. Honor would claw at her arms, dragging her nails down her skin, marking it with chalky tramlines that reddened into welts.

Catherine, a light sleeper, would catch the creak of Honor’s bed as her scratching intensified and she thrashed around, throwing out her arms and kicking against her covers.

Sometimes, Honor would scream, a primordial expression of fear that was dragged from a secret place inside her, a sound that belonged in the past, to long-dead ancestors clad in animal pelts, cornered by their nightmares while hunting in the dark.

Sometimes, she would whisper.

This whispering frightened Catherine more than the screaming. She would slip from her own bed and stumble down the hallway to her daughter’s room, unease crawling across the nape of her neck. She knew what she would find when she opened Honor’s door. The girl pressed into her pillows, blonde hair spread around her shoulders, eyes fixed on a distant corner of the wall.

While her mumbling was incoherent, her daughter’s body language was not. Arms stiffened into sticks, the cords of her neck pronounced above her collar bone, panic carved into the planes of her body.

Catherine would smooth back her daughter’s fringe and settle her back into bed, waiting until the shadows left her and she softened into sleep.

In the morning, Honor would have no memory of it, but the sight of her daughter’s distress would linger with Catherine through the daylight hours, the winter sun too weak to banish her sense of dread.

The front door slammed, shaking a picture of the Allen family that hung on the wall. Honor had left for school without saying goodbye.