Looking at Sophia now, all these years later, I shudder to think how I almost lost her. ‘How did your final exam go?’ I ask tearfully.
She gives me the briefest of looks – just to double-check I’m okay – before shrugging her shoulders. She’s used to seeing me cry. ‘Okay I guess.’
‘Can you offer anything more?’ I ask. ‘Do you think you did all right? What questions came up?’
Her eyes are sad as she looks at me and I move closer to her, resting my hand on her knee.
‘What’s up?’ I ask. ‘You’re free now. No more exams for another year.’ I look at her excitedly. ‘That must feel great, eh? You’ve got your freedom back.’
She shifts and rolls off the other side of the bed. ‘I guess.’
‘Sophia, what’s going on with you?’ I ask gently. ‘You’ve not been yourself recently.’
‘I’m surprised you’d notice,’ she says.
My natural instinct is to recoil, but I know she doesn’t mean to sound as scathing as she sometimes does. God knows, there’s been many a time when her words have hurt me more; her sense of abandonment knowing no bounds, as first her father and then her mother left her. It’s no wonder that she keeps checking I’m still here, both literally and figuratively.
‘Hey, what’s going on?’ I stand up, walk around to her and pull her to me. She does little to resist. ‘I always notice,’ I say, breathing her hair in. ‘Have these exams been getting you down?’
She nods mutely.
‘But they’re over now, no more pressure.’
‘But what if I don’t pass them?’ she says, her voice cracking. ‘What will happen then?’
‘You’re a clever girl. You’ll be fine.’
‘But what if I’m not?’ A sob catches in her throat.
Her weight falls into me as if she’s carrying the world on her shoulders. ‘Stop worrying,’ I say. ‘Worst case scenario, you fail them all.’
‘But then I won’t get into sixth form,’ she cries.
‘If that happens, we’ll work something out,’ I say reassuringly. ‘Now stop worrying. School’s out for the summer, so go and enjoy yourself.’
She shrugs me off and falls onto her bed, picking her phone up.
‘I’ve got some good news,’ I say, as I ferret in my jeans pocket. ‘Ta-dah. Bet you thought you’d lost this.’ I hold up the earring.
She peers over the lifeline in her hands. ‘That’s not mine,’ she says, and the hope that I’d been holding onto, willing myself to believe, is smashed into a thousand tiny pieces.
‘It’s not? Are you sure?’
‘Definitely. Why? Where did you find it?’
I don’t know whether I should tell her. Is her brain still as innocent as Olivia’s? Or has it been violated by the evil on the internet and the trolls on social media? I’d hate for her to put two and two together and come up with five.
I chance it. ‘It must be yours, it was in Nathan’s car.’
I laugh lightly, conscious not to convey my suspicions to her. Even in the midst of her tempestuous teens, Nathan is still her hero and it would break her heart, just after it broke mine, if he was fooling around with someone else.
She stops tapping on her phone and looks up at me with a furrowed brow. ‘In Nathan’s car?’
I can see her brain whirring. Her expression tells me that she’s come up with the wrong answer to the equation and I immediately regret telling her.
‘Well, it must be yours then,’ she says.
‘Maybe it’s one of your friends’?’ I ask. ‘Could it be Hannah’s?’
A look of recognition crosses her features. ‘Ah, yes, that must be it.’ I don’t know if she’s trying to convince herself or me.
‘Might Nathan have taken her home? Given her a lift?’
She nods. ‘I think he dropped her back after Megan’s party.’ It feels as if she’s clutching at the same straws that I am. ‘And didn’t he take Lizzy home from here the other night?’ she adds.
‘No worries,’ I say, far too casually. ‘Ask them when you next see them.’
What I really want to say is, Can you ring them both, right now, so we can put an end to this and I can sleep soundly tonight?
As expected, I lie awake, waiting for Nathan to come home from his weekly game of golf, which is invariably followed by an even longer drink in the bar. I’ve gone through every possibility in my mind and a headache is banging at the sides of my skull. The way I see it, there are only two feasible options.