I cut off the thought in my mind, but it springs back: it’s not only my family who need me. Damon Blundy needs me too. For a while, I thought I loved him. I thought the man I loved was him. Is that a good enough reason for me to be determined to do all I can to bring his killer to justice?

I don’t care. I’m determined, whether I should be or not. Whoever murdered Damon will pay—I’m going to make sure of that.

I find the old email I sent King Edward and open the attachment: my story, the one I wrote specially for him before I knew he was lying to me about his identity. I wrote it, but I’ve never read it—not even before I sent it. Writing it was hard enough.

If I can make it all the way through to the end, I can handle anything.

I start to read.

Once upon a time, there was a twelve-year-old boy who had a seventeen-year-old sister. The sister lied to their parents all the time, about almost everything. If she hadn’t, they would have allowed her no privacy. They’d have forced their way into her soul, and whatever they found in there, they’d have torn it to shreds in their determination to improve her character.

Despite her best efforts to deceive her parents, the boy’s sister usually ended up getting caught in her various lies. This resulted in daily rows that the boy had to listen to whether he wanted to or not. Even if he went into his bedroom and closed the door, he could hear his father yelling, sometimes for hours, and his sister crying. The noise always came from the same place: his father’s games room, in which he played snooker and table football and darts. The games room was across the hall from the boy’s bedroom, no more than a few feet away. His father always made sure to close the games room door, but, at that distance, even twenty closed doors wouldn’t have protected the boy from the sound of the fighting.