School had started back on 7 January and I had gone back to being the ‘other’ Saffyre Maddox, the one who showed up in the classroom every morning clean and fresh, hair neatly tied back, some mascara, some lip gloss. It wasn’t so much that I actively wanted to look nice, it was more that if I didn’t look nice, people would worry, they’d ask me questions, the pastoral-care woman would pull me into her office and expect me to tell her what was wrong with me. So I did my schoolwork. I traded in gossip. I smiled at boys but kept them at arms’ length. It was like I was Superman or something, with my two different personas. By day I was Saffyre Maddox, aloof but popular, mild-mannered A-grade student. By night I was a kind of nocturnal animal, like the human equivalent of a fox. My superpower was invisibility. There in the playground at school, or in the sixth-form common room, all eyes were on me, but at night I did not exist, I was the Invisible Girl.

The confrontation with Harrison had been horrific on many levels. The sound of my name on his lips. The same lips he’d licked while he’d done what he’d done to me when I was a child. The size of him, no longer a child, but a man, an adult. The way he appeared in the half-darkness, dressed in black. The thought of him out there now, just being able to go where he wanted and do what he wanted. And that was the root of it really. That was what turned my head from self-harm to Harrison-harm. I felt like we were occupying the same territory, the same ground. We were both invisible but we’d seen each other, like two foxes facing off in the muted street light. I thought, I do not want to hurt myself any more because of what this person did to me. I thought, I want to hurt him.

Now, wherever I went, I looked for him.

I knew it would be only a matter of time until our paths crossed again.

Mid-January. Cold as cold can be. I had fallen asleep in the plot of land across from Roan that now felt very much like it was mine. I rarely slept and when I did it was fast and immediate and hard and deep, usually for ten minutes, maybe sometimes as much as half an hour. Noises always woke me. Every noise. But this noise didn’t wake me. The sound of a young man entering the empty plot at two o’clock in the morning and sitting behind the JCB just out of sight of me and my little campsite.

He didn’t know I was there. I didn’t know he was there. And then I was wide awake and, with that strange intake of breath that accompanies a sudden wakening, I was upright. I looked up and I saw a face and it was a face I knew.

‘Oh my fucking God.’ The boy clutched his heart. ‘What the fuck?’

I said, ‘Josh?’

He said. ‘Yes. Fuck. How do you know my name?’

And I was fuddled by sleep and not thinking straight and I said, ‘I know your dad.’ I pulled my sleeping bag high up around me, suddenly cold.

‘How do you know my dad?’

‘I was in therapy with him.’

‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘More than three years.’

‘So why are you sleeping here?’ said Josh.

‘It’s a long story,’ I said.

‘Are you homeless?’.

‘No. I’ve got a home.’

‘So why …? Is it something to do with my dad?’

Where to start with that one? I did not have a clue.

‘Yeah,’ I began. ‘Kind of. Or at least, it started off being about your dad. And now it’s about loads of other things. I just like being outdoors; it’s like I can’t breathe with a roof over my head.’

‘You’re claustrophobic?’

‘Yeah. Maybe I am. But only at night.’

‘Do you sleep here every night?’

‘Yeah. I do now.’

‘So, was it you,’ said Josh, ‘here, on New Year’s Eve?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I was here. I was hiding. In the corner over there.’

I didn’t know what made me so open to his questions. There was something about him, something pure, untainted. I looked at him and I thought he would understand me.

‘So you were listening to our conversation?’

‘Yeah. You and your friend were going to unmask yourselves. Or something.’

‘Ha. Yeah. That’s right. I think we were maybe a bit wasted.’

‘I thought maybe you were planning a school shooting.’

‘Er,’ said Josh wryly, ‘no.’

‘Good. So, what were you talking about?’

‘Just how we were going to change it up. You know, stop being invisible. Make ourselves “relevant”.’

‘Fuck that,’ I said. ‘Seriously. Fuck that. Don’t be seen. Stay behind the scenes. That’s the place to be.’

We fell silent for a moment and then Josh came around the JCB and sat down with me.

‘So, my dad? Was he any good? I mean, was he a good therapist?’

I shrugged. ‘Yeah, in some ways. But in others, no. Like, I enjoyed our sessions and he did stop me from self-harming. But he left something behind. Inside me. It’s still there.’

‘Something? Like what?’

‘Like a cancer. It’s like he got rid of the symptoms, but he left the tumour.’

‘That’s shit,’ says Josh. Then he says, ‘I hate my dad.’

His words stopped me in my tracks. ‘Really? Why?’

‘Because he’s having a fucking affair.’

‘Whoa. How do you know that?’

‘Because I’ve seen him. He flaunts it. And my mum’s too much of a soft touch to see what’s right under her nose. They nearly split up last year and I reckon that was because of an affair, too.’

‘What do you mean, you’ve seen him?’

‘I mean, I’ve seen him. With this girl. All, like, touching her hair and stuff. Not even trying to hide it. And it’s like … My mum is the best person in the whole world. She’s so sweet and loving and kind; she’d do anything for anyone. And he just plays about like he can do whatever he wants and then come home and she’ll have cooked him a nice meal and she’ll listen to him moaning on about how stressful his job is. And I just wonder, you know, how someone whose job it is to look after people, to fix their minds, to nurture and cure, how they can do what he does to another human being every single day of his life. It makes me sick.’

I had so much I wanted to say. But I just tucked my hands between my knees to warm them up and stayed silent.

‘And that’s one of the things I want to change this year. Like I was saying on New Year’s Eve. No more Mr Nice Guy.’

‘What are you going to do?’

His head dropped. He said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘She’s called Alicia Mather,’ I said.

His head shot up. ‘What?’

‘The woman your dad’s having an affair with. Her name’s Alicia Mather. I know where she lives.’

He blinked. ‘How?’

‘I’ve been watching too. I’ve seen them. He met her at work. She’s a psychologist, like him. They started dating in the summer. They spent the night at a hotel just before Christmas. She lives in Willesden Green. She’s twenty-nine. She’s got two degrees and a PhD. She’s pretty smart.’

He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he looked at me with those eyes, so like Roan’s eyes, and said, ‘Who are you? Are you real?’

I laughed.

‘You’re really pretty,’ he said.

I said, ‘Thank you.’

‘Am I dreaming you? I don’t get this. I don’t get any of this.’

‘We’ve met before.’

He said, ‘What? When?’

‘Last year. You did a couple of beginners’ classes at the martial-arts place. I spoke to you in the changing room. Do you remember?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I do. You had pink hair then. Didn’t you?’

‘Yeah. That was me.’

‘Did you know who I was? Even then?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I did.’

‘Is that why you spoke to me?’

‘Yup.’

‘I was so embarrassed. You were so pretty.’

‘Yeah, you can stop saying that now.’

‘Sorry.’

I smiled. I didn’t mind. There was something so easy about the boy. ‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’m only joking. Why did you stop going? To the dojo?’

He said, ‘I didn’t. I still go. I just changed my class times. I go on Fridays now.’

‘Are you any good?’

He said, ‘Yeah. Green belt. So, you know, getting there.’

‘Remember you told me you wanted to be able to defend yourself? That’s why you were taking lessons? You told me you’d been mugged?’

He nodded.

‘What happened?’

He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a little bag. As he talked he constructed a spliff on his thigh.

‘This guy,’ he said, pulling out a Rizla from a paper packet. ‘Came up behind me. Last summer. Just down there.’ He pointed down the hill. ‘Put his arm round my throat, quite tight. Said, What you got? Put his hands in all my pockets. I tried to push him off but he said, I’ve got a knife. OK? Then he took my phone and my earbuds and my debit card and he pushed me, really hard, so I nearly fell on to my face and I grabbed hold of the wall to stop myself falling and then he ran. And I just stood there. My heart pounding. It was, like, the scariest, scariest thing. And I didn’t do anything. I just stood there and let him take my stuff. Stuff my mum and dad worked really hard to pay for. Stuff he had no right to. And it makes me so fucking angry. I just feel like now, if I saw him, I would kill him.’

His words hit me hard. I drew in my breath. ‘I know exactly how you feel.’

And then – and how weird is this, after three years of taxpayers paying for Roan to fix me in his warm room at the Portman, after all those hours and hours and hours of talking and talking and talking but never saying the one thing that really mattered? – I finally found the words to tell someone about Harrison John.

‘Something like that happened to me,’ I said. ‘Someone took something from me. And I let them.’

‘What was it?’