just gave up. Let the police or school deal with them. Phoebe knows you won’t give up on her, though.’
‘Why would she behave horribly in the first place?’ I asked, hoping to get an insight into the mysterious and unhinged workings of the teenage brain.
Victor said, ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think she just likes being centre of attention.’ He carried on. ‘Not in a bad way, but the sporty girls are the really popular ones at school and I think she does it to get in with the in-crowd. Just sort of pushes it a bit far to show off.’
Who knew that instead of wasting all that money over the years on guitar lessons, extra maths and a brief spell of horse riding, we should have been funnelling our cash into making sure she was in the A team for netball? I’d had my eye on good grades as the gold standard of parenting. No exam success was going to propel her to stardom if she ended up with a baby at seventeen or, even worse, behind bars.
‘Does she have really close friends?’ I realised I wasn’t sure who she hung out with now, as I got the distinct impression from Faye bundling various giggling girls into her car at school pick-up that she was busy trying to engineer other friendships for Georgia.
Victor rubbed at his eyebrow in a gesture that reminded me so much of Patrick I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed before.
He screwed up his face. ‘I don’t want to snitch.’
‘You’re not. You’re helping me to keep her safe.’
‘She mainly hangs out with the boys in the year above.’
‘Was the one she was with tonight in the year above?’
Victor hesitated.
‘It’s okay. You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. I found her in my bed with him.’ A bitter little sound escaped me. The irony of pumping Victor for information that might help me protect Phoebe was not lost on me.
‘He’s the older brother of one of the boys in the upper sixth.’
Not even a schoolboy any more. What the hell was he doing with a sixteen-year-old who still screamed for Patrick to get a spider out of her bedroom? No point in pretending to myself that contraception was no longer an urgent issue.
I sensed Victor getting ready to make an excuse to leave.
‘Is she still friendly with Helaina and the rest of that group?’
‘Sort of. I think she’s fallen out with some of the girls in our year.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘Not really. They can all be a bit bitchy and over the top.’
I had to agree. On the few occasions Phoebe cracked the door open slightly onto her Instagram/Snapchat world and all the pouting and posing and ‘Gorgeous!/So sexy, hun’, it felt like peering into an online version of Lord of the Flies. How a teenager viewed those pictures depended on whether you were smiling out of one or gazing enviously in. At least when I was her age, I didn’t have photographic evidence that I’d been left out of all the cool parties.
‘Georgia’s nice though.’ Victor smiled, that soft little smile I’d forgotten existed in the world. The smile of someone who was falling in love.
I looked at him. My heart shuttled back and forth between the ease of our lives if he went to live in Australia and the nightmare I had no idea how to resolve if we decided to tell him and Phoebe that Patrick was his father. I knew what Patrick would insist on, that sense of justice I’d always adored in him. He’d say that Victor was the innocent party and he shouldn’t be the one to pay the price. I could hear him now: ‘We’re the grown-ups. We can choose to be kind.’
All of which was true. However, I wasn’t sure I was magnanimous enough to risk sending Phoebe into even more of a downward spiral to protect the son my husband had had with my best friend.
Ginny should have told me. Or told no one. What she’d done was so cruel, burying a time bomb in our lives that she must have known would detonate at some point. What if I’d found out in three years, five, ten? Would it have made it better or worse? I hadn’t even started to process grieving for her and now I had to review my entire friendship with her in a different light.
I jumped to my feet, wanting to stop looking at the evidence right in front of me. ‘Time for