Silently, I ask myself the long-avoided question: why didn’t Mum protect me? Why didn’t she ever beg or calmly ask or yell at Dad to leave me alone? How could she bear to see him persecute me day after day, when I feel like smashing Miss Stefanowicz’s head against a wall repeatedly for failing Ethan on one test? Do I love Sophie and Ethan more than Mum loved me as a child? Do I care more about their suffering than she did about mine? Or was she so scared of Dad that she was too afraid to question his treatment of me?

He wouldn’t have accepted that it was persecution. In his mind, it was good parenting: “You will bring yourself into line with how I want you to be or I will make you suffer.”

What about Lee? Why did he never come hurtling out of his bedroom screaming, “Leave my sister alone?” I know Lee loved me.

Do you? What about what he did behind your back?

Lining the shelf beside the computer are a dozen or so family photographs, framed. They’re mainly of me, Adam, Sophie and Ethan, but there are two of Lee—both of him as a very young child. It’s strange, given that we’re still in contact, but I have completely blocked Lee-the-grown-man from my mind. I’ve done so all my adult life. When we get together—when I can’t avoid seeing him—I arrange it so that I don’t really see him. I don’t meet his eye, don’t look in his direction. He must notice it, but no one else would. Whenever I can, I try to get Melissa on her own, see her when Lee’s not there. I behave in this way so that I can continue to keep my innocent baby brother alive in my imagination: the one in the photographs on the shelf, with the red tricycle and the royal blue zip-up sweater.

The one who hadn’t yet betrayed his sister.

I save my draft email to Dimwit Stefanowicz and sign out of my Yahoo account. I’ll tell Adam and the children I wrote and sent the email, and do it first thing in the morning.

Now for King Edward.

I log into my Hushmail account, open his last message to me and read it again. Then I click on the “reply” button and start to type:

Hello, King Edward,

I agree to your conditions. If you let me down again . . . well, let’s just say you’d be foolish to risk it.

Nicki

Delete that last part. Delete it. Only someone lacking a brain altogether would threaten a dangerous murderer.

I press “send.”