Even with good parents, you’re fucked, Mary thought. Imagine how screwed up Jack could still turn out to be. She was sobbing the way Jack used to when he was little – no holding back. He stopped the howling over a decade ago, but he was always up for a hug. She was proud she knew a man who hugged and cooked and danced, and that she got him to adulthood without being forced into a white van.

She turned off the song, threw her latest flipchart attempt in the fire, and reconsidered the question.

Who is the problem?

Beckoning the power of Lil, she decided not to take the blame and wrote another option. After she’d written the name, she imagined the ghost of her inner social worker levitating above her, all black and smoky, and with pleading eyes – Please let me come back.

‘Fuck off,’ Mary said to the apparition before underlining the correct answer to Who is the problem?

DEREK McLAVERTY

Mary’s nest seemed to be trembling. She wandered from room to room in search of a stable piece of ground. She’d have to move from here because of Derek McLaverty. He’d managed to destroy her life in less than a week, and there was no sign of him stopping. DEREK McLAVERTY, he was the problem, and Mary would fix him.

How? She knew better than to fight back online. She didn’t even know what Whatsup was. And she didn’t want to kill him, as this would mean losing the moral high ground. What matters to him? she wrote on the chart. His kids? (obv not). His ex-wife? (nah). How do you bring a man like him down?

It was getting dark at last. The Orange men had disbanded, and Mary felt safe enough to open the kitchen window for some air.

A bin clanged. Someone was standing out the back. Mary grabbed her keys, headed downstairs and unlocked the door to the garden. ‘John Paul?’ She could see the shape of him standing there, the cheeky bugger. ‘John Paul, I told you it’s not in there.’

He didn’t move or say anything.

Mary lit the ground with her phone as she walked across the green. ‘Are you hungry? I’ve got lasagne.’ She could do with some company, and John Paul was the only person in the universe who didn’t hate her guts. ‘Come on, I’ll feed you.’ Her phone-light reached his feet. She lifted it to illuminate his face.

Jimmy McKinley’s face.

‘Jesus Christ. What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Where is it?’ said her elderly sex offender.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ At first Mary meant what she said, then it slowly began to dawn on her.

‘Do you know how many years I worked on that?’

‘Worked on what, Jimmy? I’m calling 999.’

‘Where is it?’