She couldn’t speak.

‘I got them this morning. I wasn’t ignoring you. If I’d known … everything … I wouldn’t have left you to deal with all that alone.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said briskly. ‘You’d done enough.’ A large piece of flint was embedded in the ground in front of her. She kicked at some dirt with her good foot, trying to dislodge it. ‘And it was very kind of you to bring us to the Olympiad. Whatever happens I’ll always be –’

‘Will you stop?’

‘What?’

‘Stop kicking stuff. And stop talking like …’ He turned to her. ‘Come on. Let’s go and sit in the car.’

‘What?’

‘And talk.’

‘No … thank you.’

‘What?’

‘I just … Can’t we talk out here?’

‘Why can’t we sit in the car?’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘I don’t understand. Why can’t we sit in the car?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know.’ Tears sprang to her eyes. She wiped at them furiously with the palm of her hand.

‘I don’t know, Jess.’

‘Then I can’t tell you.’

‘Oh, this is ridiculous. Just come and sit in the car.’

‘No.’

‘Why? I’m not going to stand out here unless you give me a good reason.’

‘Because …’ her voice broke ‘… because that’s where we were happy. That’s where I was happy. Happier than I’ve been for years. And I can’t do it. I can’t sit in there, just you and me, now that …’

Her voice failed. She turned away from him, not wanting him to see what she felt. Not wanting him to see her tears. She heard him come and stand close behind her. The closer he got the more she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to tell him to go but she couldn’t bear it if he did.

His voice was low in her ear. ‘I’m trying to tell you something.’

She stared at the ground.

‘I want to be with you. I know we’ve made an unholy mess of it but I still feel more right with you doing wrong than I feel when everything’s supposedly right and you’re not there. Fuck. I’m no good at this stuff. I don’t know what I’m saying.’

Jess turned slowly. He was gazing at his feet, his hands in his pockets. He looked up suddenly.

‘They told me what Tanzie’s wrong question was.’

‘What?’

‘It was about the theory of emergence. Strong emergence says that the sum of a number can be more than its constituent parts. You know what I’m saying?’

‘No. I’m crap at maths.’

‘I don’t want to go back over it all. What you did. It’s not like I’m perfect. But I just … I want to try. It might prove to be a huge f**k-up. But I’ll take that chance.’

He reached out then and gently took hold of the belt loop of her jeans. He pulled her slowly towards him. She couldn’t tear her eyes from his hands. And then, when she finally did lift her face to his, he was gazing straight at her and Jess found she was crying and smiling, perhaps the first time she had smiled properly in about a million years.

‘I want to see what we can add up to, Jessica Rae Thomas. All of us. What do you say?’

41.

Tanzie

So the uniform for St Anne’s is royal blue with a yellow stripe. You can’t hide in a St Anne’s blazer. Some girls in my class take them off when they’re going home, but it doesn’t bother me. When you work hard to get somewhere, it’s quite nice to show people where you belong. The funny thing is that when you see another St Anne’s student outside school it’s the custom to wave to each other, like people who drive Fiat 500s. Sometimes it’s a big wave, like Sriti, my best friend, who always looks like she’s on a desert island trying to attract a passing plane, and sometimes it’s just a tiny lifting of your fingers down by your school bag, like Dylan Carter, who gets embarrassed about talking to anyone, even his own brother. But everyone does it. You might not know the person waving, but you wave at the person in the uniform. It’s what the school’s always done. It shows that we’re all a family, apparently.

I always wave, especially if I’m on the bus.

Ed picks me up in the car on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that’s when I have maths club and Mum works late at her handywoman thing. She has three people working for her now. She says they work ‘with’ her, but she’s always showing them how to do stuff and telling them which jobs to go to and Ed says she’s still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of being a boss. He says she’s getting used to it. He pulls a face when he says it, like Mum’s the boss of him, but you can tell he likes it.

She takes Friday afternoons off and meets me at school and we make biscuits together, just me and her. It’s been nice, but I’m going to have to tell her I’d rather stay late at school, especially now I’m going to do my A level in the spring. Dad hasn’t had a chance to come down yet, but we Skype every week and he says he’s definitely going to. He’s got two job interviews next week, and lots of irons in the fire.

Nicky is at sixth-form college in Southampton. He wants to go to art school. He has a girlfriend called Lila, which Mum said was a surprise on all sorts of counts. He still wears lots of eyeliner but he’s letting his hair grow out to its natural colour, which is sort of a dark brown. He’s now a whole head taller than Mum and sometimes when they’re in the kitchen he thinks it’s funny to rest his elbow on her shoulder, like she’s a bar or something. He still writes in his blog sometimes, but mostly he says he’s too busy so it would be okay if I take it over for a bit. Next week it will be less personal stuff and more about maths. I’m really hoping lots of you like maths.