“Mum,” I snapped, and I pulled myself free. I walked to the door and let myself out. “I’ll be right the fuck back, okay?” I said, immediately feeling guilty about snapping. I closed the door, behind which I could hear my mum screaming and sobbing, “You hate meee, you hate meee . . . Lydia! I did everything for you; everything was for you. I’ll kill myself! I’ll do it! I can. I will!”

I walked down the hall, ignoring whatever the doctor next to me was saying—something about food and weight and personal hygiene. The sun was particularly bright outside, but I wanted to get out. In here, I felt strange, like my skin was burning, like the guilt was a fire that was spreading deep inside my body.

“Okay,” I said to the doctor outside, surprised to find my voice was shaking. “It’s nice meeting you.”

“You too. We will be in touch, probably in the next couple of days, but we have a policy here, as I’m sure you’ve already been told, of not letting residents talk to any family or friends for the first week. But if you need anything at all, you have our number.”

I put my hand out for the doctor to shake. “Blimey!” he said. “Your hands are cold.” I sighed. I couldn’t be bothered to think of an excuse. I ended up just agreeing, like he had expressed an opinion about something, rather than a fact. “Yeah, true,” I said. “Thank you.”

The doctor cocked his head sympathetically. And then, as I turned to walk toward the gate, he said, “Okay, so . . .” I expected him to say something else before I walked out of earshot, so I slowed down my footsteps, but he didn’t. He just left the “so” hanging there in the air and went back into the building.

I went back to my mum’s house straight after. I topped up my sunscreen and walked in the shade as much as possible, but my nose and the top of my forehead still got burned. At home, I put some Neal’s Yard Baby Balm on the red bits of my skin. I swept and vacuumed the floors, pulling up the dust from the carpets that had accumulated over all the time we’d lived in this house. All of our DNA, maybe even some of Dad’s DNA from when he was alive. I held a clump of it—bits of skin and hair with carpet fluff and dead bugs mixed in—up to my nose and inhaled, thinking that I could connect with my dad somehow in the smell, before putting it in the bin. I cleaned the sink too, which was stained from years of use.