there’s something badly wrong,’ I tell her. ‘The children – Thomas and Emily Cater – are being harmed somehow. I’m not sure how but I know it’s happening. Lewis is the driving force behind it. Lewis was and is always a driving force – that’s all he knows how to be. And you’re being harmed by it, whatever it is. Maybe that’s your choice – to stay in that house with those people and let them hurt you in whatever way they’re hurting you. Maybe you don’t want to be rescued, but how can you deny your children the help you know they need?’
‘You don’t know anything! You don’t understand!’
I wait a moment, then carry on as evenly as if her outburst hasn’t happened. ‘There’s a lot that I don’t understand. That’s true. I’ve worked out part of it, but not all. There are some things that still make no sense to me. Maybe you can explain them. If I’m going to help, I need to know what I’m dealing with. Why did Lewis make such a fuss about you feeding Georgina, the last time you all came to see us?’
‘What? What are you talking about?’ She sounds genuinely thrown off course by the question, as if I’ve asked her about a complicated algebra problem.
‘You must remember the last time we all got together. You found out that I’d cut up the photo you sent me of you, Lewis and the kids. We both knew we’d never see each other again, though we didn’t say it explicitly.’
‘I’d forgotten that you did that,’ Flora says quietly.
‘You forgot that I cut Georgina out of a photograph?’ I pause to consider this. It takes me a moment to realise what it means. ‘I suppose that’s possible, if you had a lot on your mind, and you did, didn’t you? You’d been distancing yourself from me for a while before that day. Months. Something else was going on in your life. It started around the time you got pregnant with Georgina. Maybe that was it, the thing that changed everything: the pregnancy. Whatever it was, there was something you couldn’t talk to me about and didn’t want me to find out. Bit by bit, you started to vanish from my life. You didn’t really want to come round that last time, did you?’
‘I remember it now,’ she says. ‘Lewis and Dom went to the pub.’
‘Yeah, for a bit. Then they came back, and they were in the kitchen, and we were in the lounge with all the children. Georgina was a tiny baby. She’d been asleep all afternoon. Then she started to stir and you picked her up to feed her. You seemed on edge – more than you’d ever been with Thomas or Emily. I assumed it was because of the tension between you and me. You’d just found out about the photo, and I thought that explained the atmosphere that you could cut with a knife. That wasn’t the explanation, though, was it? You and Lewis had brought the tension with you. He came into the room while you were feeding Georgina and yelled at you. I’d never heard him shout at you like that before. Other people, yes, but never you.
‘I wish I could remember exactly what he said. It might have been as simple as “What are you doing?”, as if feeding your child in front of your best friend was a cardinal sin and you ought to know better. He looked and sounded appalled, and it made no sense.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ says Flora.
‘I didn’t get it. I still don’t. You’d fed Thomas and Emily in front of me and Dom a million times – older Thomas and Emily – and Lewis had never batted an eyelid. He said so himself when I asked him about it earlier today: he reminded me that you used to sunbathe topless on the beach on holiday. He never minded that. So why the sudden move towards prudishness?’
Blindly following my instincts, I press on. ‘It wasn’t about modesty, was it? Lewis had never insisted that no one should see your body except him. It was about Georgina. Somehow, this is all about her. That was when everything changed: when you got pregnant with her. You didn’t tell me when you found out you were pregnant, or when she was born. And then she died. None of the other children died. Only her.’
‘Do you really want to help me, Beth?’
‘You know I do.’
‘Then don’t ask