Tug, smooth, release.

‘Because … because I want you to know that I made a terrible mistake and I’m sorry. Even if I planned to pay it back I should never have taken that money. There was no excuse for it. And Ed – Mr Nicholls was well within his rights to leave when he found out because, well, the most important thing you have with another human being is trust.’ She tried to keep her voice measured and unemotional. It was becoming harder. ‘So, I want you to know that I’m sorry I let you both down. I’m conscious that I’ve always told you how to behave, and then I did the complete opposite. I’m telling you because not telling you would make me a hypocrite. But I’m also telling you because I want you to see that doing the wrong thing has a consequence. In my case I lost someone I cared about. Very much.’

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.’

36.

Nicky

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.