As she picked out a biscuit and pushed the tin away, I took a biscuit too, dunking it calmly in my tea, though my hands were shaking a little beneath my careful control. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to tell your mum. If I lose my job, so be it.”

“If you lose your job?” She snorted derisively. “If? You’re delusional. You’re here under a fake name, probably with fake qualifications, for all I know. You’ll be lucky if you don’t end up getting sued.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ll take that risk. Now get upstairs and wipe that stuff off your face.”

“Fuck you,” she said, through a mouthful of biscuit, her words accompanied by an explosion of crumbs that spattered across my face, making me recoil, blinking and brushing fragments out of my eyes.

“You little bitch!” My temper, so carefully held, was suddenly fraying fast. “What is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Yes, you. All of you, actually. Why do you hate me so much? What have I ever done to any of you? Do you actually want to be left here alone? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you keep being such a fucking bitch to the staff.”

“What the fuck do you know about it?” she spat, and suddenly she was as angry as me, pushing back her metal stool so that it toppled and fell with a ringing clang onto the concrete floor. “You can fuck off as far as I’m concerned, we don’t want you, we don’t need you.”

There was a biting retort on the tip of my tongue, but somehow, as she stood there, the kitchen spotlights making her tousled, tangled blond hair glow like fire, with her face twisted into a grimace of rage and pain, she looked so like Maddie, so like me, that my heart gave a little skip.

I remembered myself, age fifteen, coming in after curfew, standing in the kitchen with my hands on my hips, shouting at my mum, “I don’t care if you were worried. I never asked you to stay up; I don’t need you looking out for me!”

It was a lie, of course. A total lie.

Because everything I did, every test I aced, every curfew I broke, every time I tidied my room and every time I didn’t—all of it was aimed at one thing. Making my mother notice me. Making her care.

For fourteen years, I had tried so hard to be the perfect daughter, but it was never enough. No matter how neat my handwriting, no matter how high I scored in the spelling test, or how good my art project was, it was never enough. I could spend a whole afternoon coloring a picture for her, and she would notice the one place I had sneezed and jerked my pen across the line.

I could spend my Saturday tidying my room to perfection—and she would grumble that I had left my shoes in the hall.

Whatever I did was wrong. I grew too fast, my clothes were too expensive, my friends were too noisy. I was too chubby, or conversely, I picked at my food. My hair was too messy—too thick, too hard to tame into the neat plaits and ponytails she favored.

And so as I crossed the line from child to teenager, I began to do the opposite. I had tried being perfect—so then I tried being imperfect. I stayed out. I drank. I let my grades slip. I went from total compliance to serial defiance.

It made no difference. No matter what I did, I was not the daughter I should have been. All I was doing now was confirming that fact to both of us.

I had ruined her life. That was always the unspoken message—the thing that hung between us, making me clutch at her even harder as she pulled away. And at last, I couldn’t deal with seeing that truth in her face anymore.

I left home at eighteen, with nothing but a handful of mediocre A levels and the offer of an au pair job in Clapham. By that time I was old enough not to have a curfew, or someone sitting up for me past their bedtime, reproach in their eyes when I came home.

But I was very, very far from not needing anyone to look out for me.

Maybe Rhiannon was too.

“Rhiannon.” I stepped forward, trying to keep the pity out of my voice. “Rhiannon, I know that since Holly—”

“Don’t you dare say her name,” she growled. She took a step backwards, stumbling on her high heels, and suddenly she looked like what she was—a little girl, teetering in clothes too old for her that she had barely learned how to wear. Her lips were curled in a way that could have been anger but I suspected meant she was trying not to cry. “Don’t you dare talk about that slut-faced hell witch here.”

“Who—Holly?” I was taken aback. There was something here, something different from the generalized world-hating hostility I had felt emanating from Rhiannon up until now. This was pointed, vicious, personal, and Rhiannon’s voice shook with it.

“What—what happened?” I asked. “Is this because she abandoned you?”

“Abandoned us?” Rhiannon gave a kind of derisive, hooting laugh. “Fuck no. She didn’t abandon us.”

“Then what?”

“Then what?” she imitated, cruelly mocking my south London accent, blurring her cut-glass consonants, swallowing the final t into an estuary drawl. “She stole my fucking father, if you must know.”

“What?”

“Yes, my dear darling daddy. Shagged him for the best part of two years and had Maddie and Ellie wound round her little finger covering up for them both, telling my mother lies. And do you know what the worst part of it was, I didn’t even realize what was going on until my friend came to stay and pointed it out. I didn’t believe her at first—so I set them up to find out the truth. My dad doesn’t have cameras in his study—did you ever notice that?” She gave a bitter, staccato laugh. “Funny that. He can spy on the rest of us—but his privacy is sacrosanct. I got Petra’s baby monitor, and I plugged it in under his desk and I heard them—I heard him telling Holly that he loved her, that he was going to leave my mum, that she just had to be patient, that they were going to be together in London, just like he’d promised.”

Oh fuck. I wanted to put my arms around her, hug her, tell it was okay, that it was not her fault, but I couldn’t move.

“And I heard her too, begging, wheedling, telling him she just couldn’t wait, that she wanted them to be together—I heard it, all the stuff that she wanted to do to him—it was—” She stopped, choking with disgust for a moment, and then seemed to pull herself together, folding her arms, her face set in a mask of grief too old for her. “So, I framed the bitch.”

“What—?” But I couldn’t finish. I could barely even form the word.

Rhiannon smiled, but her face was twisted like she was holding back tears.

“I got her in front of the cameras, and I wound her up until she hit me.”

Oh God. So this was where Maddie had learned it.

“And then I told her to get out, or I’d put the footage on YouTube and ensure she never worked in this country ever again, and ever since then—”

She stopped, gulping, and then tried again.

“And ever since—”

But she couldn’t finish. She didn’t need to. I knew the truth, what she was trying to say.

“Rhiannon.” I stepped towards her, my hand outstretched like I was trying to tame and gentle a wild animal, my own voice shaking now. “Rhiannon, I swear to you, there is no way in a thousand—no, a million years, I’d ever have sex with your father.”