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awake that night in bed, that I replayed the scene and decided I was angry with her – or rather, I decided I ought to be, I would have every right to be. I spend a lot of time wondering how I ought to feel about Jo, while having no idea how I actually feel.
    She called me lucky, knowing my best friend was dead, knowing that Luke and I probably wouldn’t now have children of our own. She avoided responding to what I’d said about feeling the need to shut myself out because she didn’t want our conversation to go beyond the superficial. She never does any more; I’m convinced that her apparent determination to spend every waking hour catering for at least ten people is an escape strategy – how can anyone expect you to engage in meaningful conversation with them when you’re dashing around your too-small kitchen putting together a cream tea that would make the Ritz Hotel’s equivalent look paltry?
    I look at my watch. The bus is late. It always is. We’ve been told  in an official letter from the school that while we must be prompt and prepared to wait for up to twenty minutes, the bus will never wait for us. If we are not there to pick up on the dot of half past four, the children will be returned to school and put in something called ‘Fun Club’. I was instantly suspicious when I read this: if things are fun, one doesn’t generally need to be ‘put in’ them. I wanted to write to the school and point out that its bus needs a lesson in give-and-take, but Dinah forbade me. ‘You’re going to need to fight the school over more important things,’ she told me, as if toppling the board of governors was something she’d been mulling over recently, even if she hadn’t yet wholeheartedly committed to the plan. ‘Save your energy for a fight that matters.’ This made me smile; it’s something Luke and I are always telling her. ‘Just make sure you’re on time for the bus. It’s easier for us to be on time than it is for any other family at the school,’ she added, sounding like a headmistress. I submitted because I was so relieved to hear her describe us as a family.
    Luke and I didn’t know when we bought our house that the girls’ school bus dropped off and picked up right outside; when we found out, Luke said, ‘It’s a sign. It’s got to be. Someone’s on our side.’ On yours, maybe, I thought. The kind of Someone he had in mind would have had access to information about me that I was fairly sure would result in an instant withdrawal of all supernatural support. Knowing I couldn’t say that to Luke, angry to be trapped with a secret I hated and wished would go away, I snapped at him unfairly. ‘Would that be the same Someone who let Sharon die?’ He apologised. I didn’t and still haven’t.
    Another cheery memory. Ginny Saxon would be proud.
    I can say sorry to strangers, and even send them cheques for seventy pounds that I’ve told them they don’t deserve, but I can’t apologise to my own husband, not any more; I would feel like a hypocrite. Any ‘sorry’ I might say would be nothing more than a shield for the ‘sorry’ I’m not saying, the one I can never say.
    Hypnotherapy and me are a bad match, I decide. I need something that’s going to pull me out of my endlessly churning interior world, not plunge me deeper into it.
    I’ve never been less in the mood to make polite conversation than I am now, so Sod’s Law dictates that, on the exterior world front, today there are three mothers waiting on the corner for the bus. Usually there’s only one, who cuts me dead because I once said the wrong thing. I’ve forgotten her name and the name of her shaggy-headed child, but I think of her as OCB, which stands for organic cereal bar. She brings one every afternoon for her son, whose hair, she once told me, has never been cut because she can’t bear the thought of vandalising any precious part of him, and certainly not when he’s perfectly happy as he is, and why should she, purely