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I have invaded is marching towards me. Trying to work out if I’d have time to get out and run away before she reaches me, I end up staying where I am. Why did I take such an insane risk? How could I be so stupid? Dinah and Nonie will be getting off the school bus at half past four, and I won’t be there to collect them. Where will I be? In a police cell? My stomach churns in sudden, urgent pain; adrenaline forces beads of sweat through my skin. Is this a panic attack?
    ‘Put down my notebook and get out of my car.’ Her efficient calm chills me. There’s something wrong about this situation, wronger than me being here without permission. She ought to be angrier. She ought to be inside . Why did she come out? Was it a trap? Maybe she knew what I was likely to do – knew it before I did, even – and deliberately left her car unlocked, giving me the opportunity to incriminate myself, and her the chance to catch me.
    Ginny Saxon stands in the doorway of her wooden room, watching us. ‘Everything okay?’ she calls out. I can’t look at her. I stare at the open notebook in my hands.
    Then I close it, pass it to its owner.
    ‘Go home, Amber,’ she says wearily, as if I’m a naughty child whose detention has come to an end. ‘Stay at home. We’ll do the explanations part later, shall we?’
    I’ve no idea what she means, but I’m more than happy to make both our lives easier by getting the hell away from her, away from Ginny, away from 77 Great Holling Road, the scene of too many catastrophically humiliating events for me ever to be willing to come back here.
     

     
    Back in my car, I force my mind to go blank. If I’m thinking anything, it’s ‘Drive, drive, drive’. I can just make it in time for the girls, if I’m ruthless. As I approach the Crozier Bridge roundabout, I get into the lane on the far left, the only one that isn’t clogged with queueing cars. Once I’m on the roundabout, I swerve over, attracting irate beeps from other drivers, and get into the lane I need to be in. I perform the same stunt at three more roundabouts and save nearly ten minutes of queueing time.
    You are ruthless, and not only today. Don’t try to pretend this behaviour is new.
    Hypnotherapy seems to have amplified the voice in my head that’s always trying to make me feel guilty. Or maybe it hasn’t. It’s certainly magnified my paranoia.
    Drive, drive, drive. Drive, drive, drive.
    My heart rate finally slows to a manageable level when I realise that I will, after all, be there in time to meet the bus. I’ve never missed it yet, not once, and I’m determined that I never will. The downside of seeing off my bus-related worries is that there is now space in my mind for other thoughts.
    She lied to me.
    The words were there in her notebook, exactly as I said: ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’. Written as a list on an otherwise blank page. No printed lines, true, but apart from that detail my description was spot on. So why did she tell me I couldn’t have seen it?
    I need another perspective on this to orientate my own – not that I know what mine is yet, other than confusion. If I tell Luke what happened, he’ll tell me it’s obvious why Red Lipstick Woman lied. Since Little Orchard, his default mode has been to listen to whatever’s puzzling me, then deny the existence of the puzzling element in case I become obsessed. ‘You’re looking at it from the wrong angle,’ he’ll say. ‘It would have been odd if she hadn’t lied. She doesn’t care if your memory’s misfiring – why should she? All she’s going to care about is preserving what’s left of her privacy. She’s written something weird in her notebook, you’ve seen it, and she doesn’t want to explain what it is. No mystery there.’
    Song lyrics? A poem? A description of her emotional state, or her personality? It was kind of her to let me have her appointment, cruel of her to sneer at Ginny for basing her hypnotherapy practice in a shed in her