They were both silent.

After a minute, Tanzie reached a hand round. Her fingers sought Jess’s, and closed briefly around them. ‘It’s okay, Mum,’ she said. ‘We all make mistakes.’

Jess closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, Nicky lifted his head. He looked genuinely bemused. ‘He would have given it to you,’ he said, and there was a faint, but unmistakable trace of anger in his voice.

Jess stared at him.

‘He would have given it to you. If you’d asked.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and her hands stilled on Tanzie’s hair. ‘Yes, that’s the worst bit. I think he probably would have done.’

A week went by. They caught the bus to see Norman every day. The vet had sewn up his eye socket where the eye had had to be taken out; there wasn’t an actual hole but it still looked pretty grim. The first time Tanzie saw his face she burst into tears. They said he might bump into things for a while once he was up and about. They said he would spend a lot of time sleeping. Nicky didn’t like to tell them he wasn’t sure anyone would be able to tell the difference. Jess stroked his head and told him he was a wonderful brave boy, and when his tail thumped gently on the tiled floor of his veterinary pen she blinked a lot and turned away.

On the Friday Jess asked Nicky to wait in Reception with Tanzie and she walked over to the front desk to speak to the woman about the bill. He guessed it was about the bill. They printed out a sheet of paper, then a second sheet, then, incredibly, a third, and she ran her finger the whole way down each page and swallowed visibly when it reached the bottom. They had walked home that day, even though Jess was still limping.

The town started to get busier, as the sea turned from mucky grey to glinting blue. It felt weird at first, the Fishers being gone. It was as if no one could actually believe it. Someone said that they’d gone to Sussex, not Surrey. Someone else said that Fisher’s dad had been arrested for aggravated assault in Northampton. Nobody’s tyres got slashed. Mrs Worboys started to walk to bingo in the evenings again. Nicky got used to being able to walk to the shop and back and realized that the butterflies he still felt in his stomach didn’t have to be there. He told them this repeatedly, but they refused to get the message. Tanzie didn’t come outside at all unless Jess was with her.

Nicky didn’t look at his blog for almost ten days. He had written that post when Norman was hurt and he was so full of anger that he had had to get it out somewhere. He had never felt rage, real rage, where he had wanted to break stuff and hit people before, but for days after the Fishers had done what they did, Nicky felt it. It boiled in his blood like poison. It made him want to scream. For those awful few days at least, writing it down and putting it out there had actually helped. It had felt like he was telling someone, even if that someone didn’t really know who he was and probably didn’t care. He just needed to know that someone would hear what had happened, would see the injustice of it.

And then, after his blood had cooled, and they heard that the Fishers were going to have to pay, Nicky felt, weirdly, like an idiot. It felt like that thing when you tell someone a bit too much and you feel exposed and spend the following weeks praying they’ll forget what you told them, afraid they might use it against you. And what was the point of putting it out there, anyway? The only people who’d want to look at a blog like that were the kind of people who slowed down to look at car crashes.

He opened it up at first because he was going to delete it. And then he thought, No, people will have seen it. I’ll look even more stupid if I take it down. So he decided to write a short thing about the Fishers being evicted and that would be the end of it. He wasn’t going to name them, but he wanted to post something good so that if anyone ever did come across what he had written they wouldn’t think his whole family were completely tragic. He read through what he’d written the previous week – the emotion and the rawness of it – and his toes actually curled with shame. He wondered who out there in cyberspace had read it. He wondered how many people in the world now thought he was an idiot as well as a freak.

And then he reached the bottom. And he saw the comments.

Hang on in there, Gothboy. People like that make me sick.

Your blog got sent to me by a friend and it made me cry. I hope your dog is okay. Please post and let us know when you get a chance.

Hey Nicky. I’m Viktor from Portugal. I don’t know you but my friend linked to your blog on Facebook and I just wanted to say that I felt like you did a year back and things did get better. Don’t worry. Peace!

He scrolled down some more. There was message after message. Kind, helpful, friendly. He put his blog into a search engine: it had been copied and linked hundreds, then thousands of times. Nicky looked at the statistics, then sat back in his chair and stared in disbelief: 2,876 people had read it. In a single week. Almost three thousand people had read his words. More than four hundred of them had taken the trouble to send him a message about it. And only two had called him a wanker.

But that wasn’t all. People had sent money. Actual money. Someone had opened an online donation account to help with the vet’s fees because they wanted Norman to be okay and left a message telling him how he could access it using a PayPal account.

I can’t donate enough to put your sister through school, but I can put something towards a new puppy for your sister if your dog doesn’t make it. I’m glad she has you.

Hey Gothboy (is that your real name??) have you thought of a rescue dog? That way something good might come out of it. I enclose a contribution! Rescue centres always need donations ;-)

A little something to help with the vet’s bills. Give your sister a hug from me. I’m so mad at what happened to you all.

My dog got hit by a car and was saved by the PDSA. I’m guessing you don’t have one near you. I thought it would be nice, as someone helped me, to help you a little. Please accept my £10 towards his recuperation.

From a fellow girl maths geek. Please tell your little sister to keep on. Don’t let them win.

It had gone viral. There were 459 shares. Nicky counted a hundred and thirty names on the donations page, two pounds being the smallest donation, and two hundred and fifty the highest. A total stranger had sent two hundred and fifty pounds. The final tally sat at £932.50, the last having come in an hour previously. He kept refreshing the page and staring at the figure, wondering if they had put a full stop in the wrong place.

His heart was doing something really strange. He placed his palm against his chest, wondering if this was what it felt like to have a heart attack. He wondered if he was going to die. What he wanted to do, though, he discovered, was laugh. He wanted to laugh at the magnificence of total strangers. At their kindness and their goodness and the fact that there were actual people out there being good and nice and giving money to people they had never met and never would. And because, most crazy of all, all that kindness, all that magnificence, was sitting there just because of his words.

Jess was standing by the cupboard holding a parcel of pink tissue when he scooted into the living room. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He pulled at her arm, dragging her over to the sofa.

‘What?’

‘Put that down.’

Nicky opened the laptop and placed it on her lap. She almost flinched, as if it was actually painful for her to be so close to something that belonged to Mr Nicholls.

‘Look.’ He pointed at the donations page. ‘Look at this. People have sent money. For Norman.’