His car wasn’t at the house, but Leah presumed the police were still holding it. Evidence. She wondered how much evidence they had against her, but surely if it had been sufficient they’d have found a way of getting hold of her by now. She’d have been arrested.

Or would she? Would they even believe him, with his track record?

She wasn’t sure whether anything she’d done involving Leighton was illegal, but there were always the drugs to go on. She had been stupid to go out that Monday night. Keira’s death had left her reeling; she hadn’t been thinking straight. All she’d known at the time was that she needed to escape that house – escape her own life – and start again somewhere new, somewhere no one knew her. And the only way to access freedom was through money.

She tapped at the front door, expecting him to be waiting for her on the other side. When he didn’t answer, she tried the handle. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open and paused a moment before calling his name. The place was empty and couldn’t have looked more like a rental property if it’d had an announcement pinned to the door: magnolia walls, industrial-grade brown carpets that wore the telltale signs of age and neglect; peeling wallpaper at the edges of the ceiling, painted over in an attempt to conceal its existence.

‘Leighton,’ she called again.

She heard a noise along the corridor. She passed the living room, empty but for a sofa and a TV unit, but there was no one there. What was she going to say to him? She didn’t know; she was just grateful that he wanted to see her again.

She had never said sorry for anything in her life; at least she’d never said it and really meant it. With him, she was beginning to think she would mean it. She had seen enough of his life to know she wanted to be a part of it. She missed not having a father figure, someone she could turn to when things weren’t making sense. She wanted to be the photo on someone’s desk at work. She had imagined what it might be like to go home to the house where his family lived. Didn’t she deserve a piece of that, no matter how small?

There was so much she regretted now that she could see the damage she had done. She wished more than anything that she could go back to the start and do things again, differently this time.

She’d reached the kitchen. Pushing the door wide, she saw someone standing at the sink at the far side of the room, back turned. It wasn’t Leighton. It was a woman. Long blonde hair that fell down her back in thick waves.

‘Sit down,’ the woman said, without turning to look at Leah. ‘We need a chat.’

Leah stayed where she was. She thought about leaving, about running back down the hallway and out onto the street, but her conversation with Carol over the phone had reminded her that she had nowhere to go. She had spent so long running from things, got so far away, there was no turning back now.

The woman turned. When she saw her face, Leah realised she wasn’t as old as she’d suspected. Much younger, in fact; about her own age. Pretty face. Familiar.

The girl had been crying. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks were flushed. There was smudged mascara on the bridge of her nose. ‘Sit down,’ she said again.

Leah sat, compliant. She could have turned and left, but things were already beginning to become clear: a series of awful, impossible events that she had until now judged entirely incorrectly. The past week played out in front of her, their missing pieces starting to fall into place.

She knew who this young woman was. She thought she knew what she’d done.

Isobel Matthews crossed the room and reached to one of the shelves. She pulled from it a kitchen knife and moved to stand near the door. In that moment, Leah realised her mistake. All her mistakes. She had thought the place empty, but Isobel had made provision. She had tried to hurt her before; this time, she was going to make sure she finished what she had started.

Leah wasn’t sure she would go through with it, but then she thought of what the girl had already been capable of.

‘How long?’ Isobel asked. The knife in her hand was shaking.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘How long?’ she said again. She held the knife out, her arm shaking unsteadily.

Did this girl think the same as the police? Did she think Leah had been sleeping with Leighton?

Leah stood, shoving the chair from beneath her. She wasn’t being silenced by this family any longer. ‘Get out of my way,’ she said calmly.

Isobel stood her ground, refusing to move. She looked defiant, filled with anger, and in that moment everything that had gone before seemed so clear, spread out before Leah as though she were watching it in film projected on to the walls of the kitchen.

‘It was you driving that car, wasn’t it?’

Isobel looked her up and down, her mouth contorting into a sneer. ‘He’s always had shit taste,’ she said, ‘but my God, his standards have dropped.’

Leah was thirteen again, being taunted about the state of her clothes: the shabby coat she’d been wearing for the previous two years; the trainers from the discount shop that had a hole in the rubber sole. Her mother had insisted on repeatedly using glue to mend it, despite the fact that it never succeeded in holding anything in place; her shoe had come unstuck in the middle of a netball match against the school’s main rivals and she had tripped over the flapping sole, falling over and losing the team the final points that went on to cost them the game.

Keeley Porter, captain of netball – spoilt little rich girl and notorious Year 9 bully – had sauntered past her, shoving her sideways while she was crouched at her broken shoe. ‘Fucking gyppo.’

Leah heard those words again so clearly now, as clearly as though Isobel had spoken them. Isobel Matthews, who thought the world owed her an explanation and she could click her fingers and everything would fall into her lap. Keeley Porter, who’d made her life a living hell throughout the whole of secondary school and had never been held to account over anything. Nobody beautiful could ever possibly be bad.

‘You fucking bitch.’

Leah forgot that Isobel was holding a knife. She forgot the pain she was still in from the hit-and-run. For a moment, everything else was wiped away and she was thirteen years old again, humiliated on a netball pitch with no one to fight her corner. Her arm flew towards the girl, her fist meeting the side of her face. Isobel recoiled, crying out in pain, and as she fell back against the kitchen door, Leah landed a second blow. The knife was dropped to the floor. Leah swung again and again, her anger with the world culminating in a torrent of violent rage. Isobel tried to fight back, but Leah’s strength overpowered her and she found herself cornered, helpless to do anything other than accept the repeated blows landing upon her. She slid to the floor, desperately trying to cover her face with her arms as Leah continued like a madwoman; a girl possessed.

At last Leah stopped. The red mist faded, dropping to the floor like a fallen curtain. Then she saw what she’d done. She stopped, stood back; saw the bloodied mess she had made of Leighton’s older daughter. She saw the violence she was capable of; all those years of suffering and endurance built up into one seething outburst of uncontrollable rage. She leaned down and took the knife from the floor. Isobel looked up at her, barely able to speak; desperate pleas leaving her mouth in an incoherent babble of pain and fear.

Leah stood back, the knife trembling in her hand, before she drew it back and plunged it into her stomach.