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afraid of a lot of things like you, and I bet your friends are too really – why don’t you ask them next time you have a sleepover? Anyway, from now on, if I’m worried and scared, I’m going to think about you and try to be just as brave as you are!
    Best wishes
Ruby x

Chapter Six
    I knew when I went down to tea that I was going to have to be as brave as Lucy, maybe even braver. It was bound to be bad because Mum made chicken risotto, and she only ever makes that when we have guests or if I’m sick or something, because it takes her hours and she has to stir it until her wrists go funny. I sat at the table and watched her stir and stir, her face tipped down into the steam as if she could see something else apart from risotto in the saucepan. Everest sat at her feet and gazed up, trying his best to psychically levitate some of the chicken out of the pan and into his paws.
    “What is it, Mum?” I finally asked her. I was pulling my fingers through my hair, which, although it smelled nice, was not any blonder than it had been this morning. Mum looked up at me and smiled, but it was one of those upside-down smiles that are really more like frowns. Like a mixture of both the comic and the tragic mask in the school badge.
    “Dad’ll be here in a minute and then we talk about things,” she told me carefully. “We just need to talkabout things, Ruby, about how things are at the moment and how things are going to be.” I felt my stomach knot up and tighten again. When she said “things” she meant us, she meant me and Mum and Dad and how we were going to be.
    “Things are fine, though,” I said, trying to stay casual, as if a nameless dread wasn’t beginning to boil up again in my tummy. Gradually, in the garden with Nydia, in the middle of our film, in the middle of the jungle with Justin swinging me through the trees on vines to save us from giant man-eating ants, my tummy knots had untied themselves and gone away. I told myself, and so did Nydia, that I’d been worrying over nothing – that I was over-imagining the way I was feeling again, and getting everything out of proportion, like I did when I thought this lump on my foot was cancer and it turned out to be an insect bite. But even if it hadn’t been for the chicken risotto, I knew that what was coming was bad when I heard Mum’s voice. When she spoke her voice sounded as if it was stretched very, very thinly, as if she were speaking from a very long way off.
    Another universe, practically.
    And then Dad came in and Mum went sort of stiff and nobody looked at me for a long time. They went about just doing normal stuff, only it wasn’t normal becausenormally they weren’t ever in the same room as long as this. Dad hung up his coat and took off his tie. Mum put out the cutlery and poured out drinks and didn’t ask me to do anything – so definitely not normal. And neither one of them told Everest off for sitting right wherever it was they were trying to walk and for making them trip and stumble. Dad didn’t even tell me his joke of the day. They just moved around like robots.
    Then we all sat at the table and Mum put out the food. I looked at it steaming on my plate; it looked delicious, but somehow not real and I couldn’t eat any. My stomach was too full up with worry.
    “Ruby, do you want some…” Mum passed me over the cheese, but I pushed it away. I couldn’t stand this abnormal normalness for a minute longer.
    “Just say it!” I snapped at her. My words popped the clingfilm of tension that had suffocated the room and suddenly the kitchen was crowded with emotion. “Just say whatever it is you’re going to say. Please. Just say it.” I felt frightened then, and very small. Mum and Dad looked at each other and there was a moment of silence. I felt Everest come and sit on my feet: his fat, warm body made my toes tickle and I told myself it was because he was on my side and not because he was just after scraps.
    “Well…” Mum almost