But climbing in the dark felt more precarious than during the day. I found rocks that had probably never before borne weight and they shifted and teetered under mine. At the top, puffing, I pulled out my phone again. No bars. I stood carefully and held the phone up and waved it around in the air. Nothing. Not even the whisper of a bar.

‘Shit!’ I stood at the top of the cairn, full of zeal to do the thing I had to do to stop the message going through to Nassim. But ‘the thing’ was not forthcoming. There was a time limit to get the message back, and without reception . . .

Eventually I stood still and let my hand drop to my side as it became obvious there was nothing at all I could do. In any other app I could have deleted it. But as it was, I was at the mercy of the fickle reception bars and the ticking clock. If there was reception before going to town tomorrow, it would unsend. If there wasn’t, it would stay sitting there in Nassim’s phone, irretrievable, waiting for him to see it. He may have already seen it.

I sat and panted and looked out over the dense black of the ground below the translucent black of the sky above. I looked down at what I’d written. What a stupid message to receive – cryptic and cruel. Should I send a following message, an explanatory one – but, oh god, explaining what? How?

I typed one out: I don’t think we should see each other anymore.

I didn’t send it and I erased it and punched out another. I can’t do this anymore, I’m so, so sorry.

It was so harsh, so abrupt. I got rid of it and tried one explaining my side of things more. It has become apparent that this relationship with you, Nassim – despite being one of the loveliest and best things – is not helping me, but is actually holding me back . . .

Stilted. Weird. Formal. I couldn’t do it. What the hell was wrong with me? I couldn’t do it.

Take the pill, break off the relationship, leave my mother’s house. That had been the plan, the whole plan.

And here I was, more in my mother’s space than I had ever been, unable to take the damn pill, and behaving badly to someone who didn’t deserve anything like that, but unable to say what had to be said. Who the hell was I? I was pigeon-livered and lacking gall.

I yelled out, a wordless, fruitless sound as frustration and confusion forced its way out, and then I sank my back against the rock.

A small stone skittered away from me on the cairn, and then clattered down the rocks and thudded onto the grass below. It made my hair stand up.

I hadn’t asked Bette which cairn Danny had fallen from. It hadn’t seemed a sensitive question. Was it this one? Right here, where I was, right now? Had Danny fallen from up here? It couldn’t have been this one. Even if he had been mucking around . . . It didn’t seem possible. But it could have been – what did I know about cairns and safety? And had he died straight away, maybe even right there, on the grass? I just couldn’t make myself believe that something like that could have happened, that it did happen. That it might have happened right here, to a fit and active fourteen-year-old boy. To my mother’s little brother.