“Good,” said the father. “Because if you go back on your word, next time there’ll be no joking around. Next time it will be the real thing. Bardolph House is a hospice, not a lunatic asylum, but there are lunatic asylums, real ones, and plenty of them. Don’t think we wouldn’t go through with it just because we didn’t today.”

The boy, the brother, didn’t understand. Somehow, he mustered the courage to ask about the two men: who were they, if they weren’t real lunatic asylum workers? His father told him that they were friends who had agreed to help him out.

The boy hoped that his sister would stop lying after that, but she didn’t. She lied as much as she ever had. Mercifully, though, there were no more trips to lunatic asylums, and somehow, after that awful day, the closed-door games room tirades didn’t seem quite so frightening. They seemed normal. The boy’s mother stopped crying when they happened. Instead, she listened to the radio in the kitchen and got on with preparing the dinner or the breakfast. The boy started to listen to music, through headphones, and found that he was able to think about other things, even knowing that the yelling was going on in the background.

The grown-up boy still sees his sister regularly. They both still see their parents regularly. Since the sister moved out of her parents’ home at age eighteen, there has been no yelling. Her brother has no idea that she only keeps in touch with their parents for his sake. If asked, he would probably say, “They fought like cats and dogs when she was a teenager, but it’s all fine now.” His sister, being an expert liar, would probably say the same thing.

By the time I’ve finished reading the story, I’m calmer than I was before. Calm enough to switch back to my Yahoo account. In the subject box of my draft email to Miss Stefanowicz, I type the words “Your test failed—my son did not.” Then I sit and stare at the screen and allow myself to think, really think in detail, about my family—not Adam, Sophie and Ethan, but the one I did not choose to be a member of: Mum, Dad and Lee—for the first time in my adult life. For some reason, I’m no longer scared of the thoughts.