Page 119 of No Safe Place

It wasn’t the same. Scott couldn’t have been giving her the pills more than once a day, and she was fitter, healthier and stronger than her thirteen-year-old self.

‘Lil?’

Her eyes opened, and she had to blink Callum into focus.

He frowned down at her. ‘You okay?’

She gulped down the question and tried to form an answer.

Angry. She should still be angry. Scott hadpitiedher – that was the worst thing. Diagnosed her and then, like the doctors before David, made decisions for her.

‘What’s happened?’ Cal demanded.

And although Lily had been so sure that Callum would fly off the handle, potentially even assault Scott, there was a worse option. Worse – she might catch a glimpse of I-told-you-so in his expression, and have to watch Cal judge her for making such a shit choice.

She couldn’t answer. She shook her head, and looked up at Cal.

He was wearing one of his own T-shirts, a white Cure band tee with a faded logo, too big on his shoulders and across his chest. There was a patch of sweat below the collar.

She’d expected him to look thinner and distraught, but he seemed solid. His shadow was blocking the sun. He was trailing the red parka behind him like a comfort blanket.

Then it dawned on her.

He was outside. Callum was out of the house.

The thought hadn’t really occurred to Lily, when she visited him on the ward, but seeing him in the street, in natural light, it felt huge.

‘David and Sam—’ Her voice came out as a croak. ‘I can’t believe they’re dead.’

‘I know.’

‘Sam was one of us,’ Lily said, limply. It was a nothing comment. It didn’t convey the depth of everything she felt, but she couldn’t think of another way to say it.

Cal spread out the parka like a picnic blanket. As he sat down, the sunlight hit her face again. He was cross-legged on the dusty pavement, his elbows on his knees, chin in his cupped hands.

Lily was glad she didn’t have to stand up yet. She glanced at the house again. There was a stray tendril of crime scene tape caught on their hedge.

‘Do you remember,’ Cal said abruptly. ‘The session where David got us all to write those letters?’

Lily remembered.

David picked up on their fears about leaving the ward, their fear of getting ill again when they weren’t wrapped up in the safety of the group.

It was a trauma, what they’d been through. David’s answerto trauma was to confront it. Put pen to paper and write to the people who let everything go so wrong in the first place.

‘Paige let me read hers,’ he said. ‘It was to her sister – because she was soangrythat she got to be the normal one. We set fire to it with my Zippo, behind the bins.’

‘I never knew that,’ Lily said, quietly.

‘Who did you write to?’ Cal asked.

‘My parents, obviously.’ Lily sniffed. The conversation was distracting her from the lump sitting low in her oesophagus. ‘Some of the doctors I had. I never posted mine, either. Did you?’

‘I only wrote one letter,’ Callum said. His eyes were shining. ‘I tried to write so many of the ones David wanted, to the people I was angry with. But I couldn’t.’ He laughed – a bitter, twisted sound. ‘I think I’d already put all of that into the book.’

Lily eased herself off the wall, joining him on the ground. She picked up one of his hands and turned it over, resting her palm on his. Not holding hands, just palm to palm. Something they hadn’t done for a long time.

‘I wrote to the house,’ he said.