Sal stayed supine. She signed where she had to sign, called who she had to call, and did it all under Jenny’s supervision. Only once did she speak up – leave the city? All her friends? But Jenny silenced her with a look. One of Kathleen’s admirers, a jolly man called John, drove them up to their new house in his car. Their belongings barely filled the boot. Kathleen kept up a brisk and cheerful commentary as the fag ends of the city slid past the windows in muddy daubs. It was lovely where they were going. You’ve been there, John? Haven’t you?

‘Oh yes. Lovely. It’s like something out of Miss Marple up there. Very picture-squeue,’

‘“Picture-squeue”. You’re funny, John,’ Kathleen said perfunctorily.

Jenny smiled, nudged Sal, who smiled too.

Those first few weeks were rocky, but Sal seemed to have learned her lesson. It helped that Marc died so soon after they moved. She lost all interest in going back to the city. She lost interest in everything, while Jenny thrived. She was a clever girl, pretty, popular enough. When she got a place at university, Sal told her she was proud, and Kathleen sent her a novelty mug from Tenerife – where she’d moved a few years before – with ‘Don’t Mess with this Tough Bitch!’ on it. The design melted off in the dishwasher within a week.

Things fell apart at university, though. Living in Halls of Residence mirrored and magnified her sense of difference. The other students drifting together in little eddies and tides of privilege made her… angry. They were more rooted than she could ever be; they had a kind of animal sense of security that Jenny thought she’d managed to achieve by moving to the village, and now understood that she’d never had at all. Maybe it would have been easier if she was with Freddie, but he was in London having a great time at his own university. When they spoke, she tried to sound cheerful, but afterwards she always cried.

She was out of her depth here. Not such a Tough Bitch after all.

She only lasted two terms. One afternoon, in a tutorial on the developmental effects of neglect, she felt something inside her switch, as if her response system had short-circuited. She stared around the table and nothing made sense – the earnest, pale children in the room seemed alien; the words were only words; the whole exercise was witless. When she tried to speak to the tutor afterwards, she couldn’t make him understand why she was so upset, and she could see that her emotions frightened him, which made her hate him.

She came back home at Christmas to find that, in the few months she’d been away, Sal had changed, and for the better She looked years younger, had lost a stone, and hadn’t had a drink in weeks. Jenny found this more unsettling than welcome. It meant that she was the only broken person in the house. She retreated to her little pink bedroom that felt like a used womb.

And weeks became months until Sal asked her to leave. She wasn’t going back, was she? Face it. Why not sign up with temping agencies? You can’t stay here on no money, you know. Why d’you want to stay here anyway?

So, Jenny, in a fit of masochism, moved to the city – the same city she’d left when she was fifteen and had never been back to since. Too many bad memories. Strangely though, once she was there, she liked it. She never came across old faces; she never went to their old area. The centre had been gentrified enough to (almost) make it seem like a different city to the one she’d lived in and left.

The menial jobs she took were strangely soothing. Simple, transactional work, with no grey areas and no reason to think. Jobs where she was obviously the cleverest, the quickest. It did wonders for her self-esteem. This strange hibernation lasted for two years, until Freddie finished university, came back, and took it on himself to drag her out of her burrow. It was good to have him back, even though he tended to bully her into self-improvement. She was so bright! For God’s sake, don’t sell yourself short! Therapy? Why not? Jesus Jen, you can’t go on like this!

And so she’d let herself be talked into seeing Cheryl, and the thread of her life untangled, smoothed and strengthened. Over the months that followed, Cheryl made her understand that what had happened at university was in many ways an inevitability. It all came down to her childhood – the chaos of living with Marc, the pain of being a parent to a parent, the crushing pressure Kathleen had brought to bear at that pivotal point of assumed escape – look after Sal, carry her, That Is Your Role. How on earth could she come into her own with Sal always waiting in the wings, ready and willing to ruin Jenny’s successful Second Act?

Each week, Cheryl picked up Sal, turned her over like some dead crab on the beach, stinking of rot, and she and Jenny would let rip… A terrible mother. A selfish mother. A damaging person; toxic. And so what if she’d stopped drinking? So what if she was fine now, had a job, was independent? Why did she wait until Jenny left home to turn into a functioning adult? Jenny had every right to take her desires as reality, just so long as she truly believed in the reality of her desires.

Jenny revelled in this power that was both intoxicatingly novel and strangely familiar. Later, she realised that she’d had the same fleeting feeling once before, when her fist had connected with Sal’s jaw all those years ago.

Then, something happened that changed her life for ever.

Ryan Needham.

There was something weird about that guy. She didn’t trust that guy. He was too perfect. Freddie was just too nice to see it, but Ryan was playing him. Manipulating him. After a particularly invigorating session with Cheryl, on a whim, Jenny messaged Ryan – if he was even called Ryan – and, feeling like she was in an episode of Catfish, told him she knew he was a fake. And it felt good. It felt really good to… win. To call a man out on manipulation, watch him squirm, watch him try and fail to defend himself.... he’d only done it to get close to her, and he was so sorry… it was pathetic. For the next few minutes she was content to watch him tie himself in knots over Messenger. Oh, they went to school together did they? Like she gave a shit. He was sorry, was he, and he didn’t mean to hurt anyone? Well, he might not have meant to, but he had – leading someone on like that for months on end. Jesus. Then she asked for a photo. If he was fool enough to send her one then he really was as stupid as he seemed.

When he did send her a photo, she laughed aloud again. Now she had a face to go with the name, she recognised him straightaway. David Crane: that creepy boy who’d dropped out of school. Who, she faintly remembered now, had stopped her in the graveyard once and made awkward conversation about World War Two. He’d got better-looking in the last few years, but still. He was back in the village, looking after his mum. That rang a bell – that big house. The cleaning company Sal worked for, they cleaned it. Mrs Hurst had told her... Rich. They were the richest people in the village.

This put a new complexion on things.

And so she kept the conversation to herself. She made ‘Ryan’ disappear from Freddie’s life, nursed Freddie through his (frankly, over-the-top) grief, while keeping in touch with David. After all, it wasn’t often that a rich, easily controlled man came along. He cried out to be cultivated. Kathleen would have been proud.

Over the next year, David, smitten puppyish, could always be relied on to help with her rent, and her bills. He was undemanding too. He rarely questioned her explanations for not meeting face-to-face and, on the few occasions that he pushed back a bit, all she had to do was withdraw, not answer a few texts, and he’d quickly back down and apologise.

She was very careful to keep all four of her cheerleaders apart from each other: Andreena was acquainted with Freddie, but not with Cheryl, and knew nothing about David. Cheryl knew about Freddie’s existence, but they never met, and Jenny made sure David’s surname was never mentioned in their sessions. Freddie knew of Cheryl, but not David; David already knew about Freddie and Andreena and knew that she saw a therapist, but he didn’t know her name – at least not until Freddie let it slip at that disastrous dinner party. Keeping the three main struts of her support network in this atomised state appealed to her for the simple reason that, if they didn’t meet they couldn’t become friends, opening up the potential for one or all of them to shift their focus from where it should be: on her.