‘Try . . . just try to pull back a bit on visiting the neighbour, okay? It’s really not our business.’

‘Okay. I’ll try.’

*

Mimi

Mimi stood in the hallway, torn for a moment about which direction she should be heading in. In one bedroom, her teen daughter was raging and had just thrown something against the wall — she was yet to find out whether it was something breakable or precious. In another, her middle daughter was sobbing uncontrollably. Usually this would be a divide and conquer kind of thing. Pete would take one daughter while she took the other. But he had his hands full downstairs with the twins.

In the end, she decided it made more sense to go to the daughter who would allow her to help.

She entered Tara’s room and sat down by her on the bed. Tara immediately threw herself across her mother’s lap, crying so hard her body shook.

‘Oh darling,’ said Mimi, rubbing her back. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s my fault.’

Tara stopped crying long enough to turn her tear-stained face up towards Mimi. ‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s her. It’s always her. She hates me.’

Mimi tried to choose her words carefully. ‘I know it feels like that, but I can promise you, she doesn’t. She’s your big sister and she loves you. It’s just that sometimes being a teenager can be hard and you say things you don’t mean.’

Tara started crying again and Mimi stroked her daughter’s hair and wished she’d been smart enough to anticipate all of this.

When she’d made the TikTok with Tara on the weekend, she hadn’t even considered it might come back to bite her. She’d had a lot of fun learning the dance together with Tara. They’d fallen about laughing each time one or the other of them got a move wrong, and it had taken a good hour or two to finally get the choreography right. Eventually, they’d nailed it and uploaded it to Tara’s account along with a few of the bloopers. Mimi knew Tara was a little young for any kind of social media apps, but they’d let her have TikTok because she loved making videos, and they’d set her up with a private account with restricted access. She was only allowed to accept followers that she knew.

The problem, apparently, was that she’d accepted follow requests from a few of Callie’s friends. And those friends had shown the video to some other friends and eventually, someone at school had made fun of Callie for her mum’s ‘pathetic’ dance moves.