“Brilliant idea,” I said. “I mean, it’s so important not to let a house just sit there being lived in.”

Ned missed the sarcasm. “Obviously,” he said hastily, in case I started looking for a bigger cut, “it’s going to take, like, a ton of investment cash just to get it off the ground. So two hundred’s the best I can do. Are we good with that? Can I get the paperwork moving?”

I pursed up my mouth and pretended to mull that one over. “I’ll have to have a little think about it.”

“Ah, for fuck’s sake.” Ned raked a hand through his quiff, frustrated, then smoothed it carefully back into shape. “Come on. This has been dragging on for, like, ever.”

“Sor-ry,” I said, shrugging. “If you were in such a major hurry, you should’ve made me a decent offer to start with.”

“Well, I am now, right? I’ve got investors lining up begging to get in on the ground floor of this, but they won’t hang around forever. These are serious guys? With serious money?”

I gave him the smirk, with a bitchy little nose-wrinkle thrown in. “So I’ll seriously let you know the exact second I decide. OK?” And I waved bye-bye.

Ned stayed put for another few seconds, shifting from foot to foot and looking majorly pissed off, but I kept the glassy smirk going. “Right,” he said, finally. “Fine. Whatever. Let me know.”

In the doorway he turned to tell me, impressively, “This could put me on the map, you know. This could have me playing with the big boys. So let’s not fuck it up, OK?”

He was trying for a dramatic exit, but he lost his chance by tripping over something as he turned to flounce off. He tried to save it by breaking into a jaunty little jog across the field, not looking back.

I switched off my torch and waited there, in the cottage, while Ned sloshed through the grass and found his way back to his studmobile and Panzered off towards civilization, the throb of the SUV tiny and meaningless against the huge night hillsides. Then I sat down against the wall of the outer room and felt my heart beat where hers had finished beating. The air was soft and warm as cream; my arse went to sleep; tiny moths whirled around me like petals. There were things growing beside me out of the earth where she had bled, a pale clump of bluebells, a tiny sapling that looked like hawthorn: things made of her.

Even if Frank hadn’t caught the live show, he would hear that conversation in just a few hours, as soon as he got into work the next morning. I should have been on the phone to him or Sam or both, working out the best ways to use this, but I felt like if I moved or tried to talk or breathed too hard my mind would spill over, soak away into the long grass.

I had been so sure. Can you blame me? This girl like a wildcat gnawing off her own limbs sooner than be trapped; I had been positive that forever was the one word she would never say. I tried to tell myself she might have been planning to give the baby up for adoption, ditch the hospital as soon as she could walk and vanish from the parking lot to the next promised land, but I knew: those numbers she had been throwing around with Ned weren’t for any hospital, no matter how fancy. They were for a life; for two lives.

Just like she had let the others sculpt her delicately, unconsciously, into the little sister to round out their strange family, just like she had let Ned shape her into the clichés that were all he understood, she had let me make her into what I was longing to see. A master key to open every slamming door, a neverending freeway to a million clean starts. There’s no such thing. Even this girl who left lives behind like rest stops had found her exit, in the end, and had been ready to take it.

I sat in the cottage for a long time, with my fingers wrapped around the sapling-gently, it was so new, I didn’t want to bruise it. I’m not sure how long it was before I managed to make myself stand up; I barely remember walking home. A part of me was actually hoping John Naylor would leap out of a hedge, blazing with his cause and looking for a screaming match or an all-out brawl, just to give me something I could fight.

The house was lit up like a Christmas tree, every window blazing, silhouettes flitting and a babble of voices pouring out, and for a moment I couldn’t take it in: had something terrible happened, was someone dying, had the house tilted and sideslipped and tossed up some gay long-gone party, if I stepped onto the lawn would I tumble straight into 1910? Then the gate clanged shut behind me and Abby threw the French doors open, calling, “Lexie!” and came running down the grass, long white skirt streaming.

“I was keeping an eye out for you,” she said. She was breathless and flushed, eyes sparkling and her hair starting to come loose from its clips; she had obviously been drinking. “We’re being decadent. Rafe and Justin made this punch stuff with cognac and rum and I don’t know what else is in it but it’s lethal, and nobody has tutorials or anything tomorrow so fuck it, we’re not going into college, we’re staying up drinking and making eejits of ourselves till we all fall over. Sound good?”

“Sounds brilliant,” I said. My voice came out strange, dislocated-it was taking me a while to pull myself together and catch up-but Abby didn’t seem to notice.

“You think? See, at first I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Rafe and Justin were already making the punch-Rafe set some kind of booze on fire, on purpose, like-and they yelled at me for always worrying about everything. And, I mean, at least for once they’re not bitching at each other, right? So I figured what the hell, we need it. After the last few days-God, after the last few weeks. We’ve all been turning into crazy people, did you realize that? That thing the other night, with the rock and the fight and… Jesus.”

Something crossed her face, a dark flicker, but before I could place it, it had vanished and the reckless, tipsy gaiety was back. “So I figure, if we go completely nuts for tonight and get everything out of our systems, then maybe we can all chill out and go back to normal. What do you think?”

Being this drunk made her seem much younger. Somewhere in Frank’s bomber-paced war-game mind she and her three best friends were being lined up and inspected, one by one, inch by inch; he was evaluating them, cool as a surgeon or a torturer, deciding where to make the first test cut, where to insert the first delicate probe. “I would love that,” I said. “God, I’d love that.”

“We started without you,” Abby said, rearing back on her heels to inspect me anxiously. “You don’t mind, do you? That we didn’t wait for you?”

“Course not,” I said. “As long as there’s some left.” Far behind her, shadows crisscrossed on the living-room wall; Rafe bent with a glass in one hand and his hair gold as a mirage against the dark curtains, and Josephine Baker poured out through the open windows, sweet and scratchy and beckoning: “Mon ręve c’était vous…” In all my life I had seldom wanted anything as wildly as I wanted to be in there, get this gun and this phone off me, drink and dance until a fuse blew in my brain and there was nothing left in the world except the music and the blaze of lights and the four of them surrounding me, laughing, dazzling, untouchable.

“Well, of course there’s some left. What do you think we are?” She caught my wrist and headed back towards the house, pulling me behind her, twisting her skirt up off the grass with her free hand. “You have to help me with Daniel. He’s got this big glass, but he’s sipping it. Tonight isn’t about sipping. He’s supposed to be swigging. I mean, I know he’s getting enough into him to do some good, because he went off into this whole long speech about the labyrinth and the Minotaur and something with Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream, so he’s not sober. But still.”