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. . . ?’ His face was drawn. ‘Oh, man, I thought . . . I thought . . .’
    I stared at him. He looked completely panic-stricken, his breath coming out in ragged gasps. He sat back and covered his face with his hands. ‘Don’t freakin’
do
that,
Riv.’ His voice cracked. ‘Please. Don’t ever do that again.’
    I scrabbled up onto my elbows. ‘It was just a joke, Flynn. Why are you . . . ?’
    ‘That’s how my mum looked when we found her,’ he whispered through his fingers. ‘After Da hurt her. The time she went to hospital.’

6
    Flynn was still kneeling beside me, his face in his hands. I reached out towards him, guilt flooding through me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I touched his arm,
wanting to pull his hands away from his face, to hold him, to make up. How could I have been such an idiot? ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
    Slowly Flynn let me pull his wrist away. He looked up. The terrified, vulnerable look had gone completely.
    ‘Don’t feel sorry for me,’ he said. His voice sounded harsh, but I could hear the hurt underneath.
    ‘I’m not,’ I stammered. ‘But it . . . must have been awful.’
    Flynn shrugged. ‘Just forget it.’
    ‘But—’
    ‘I made it up. It was a joke.’
    What?
    I stared at him, completely bewildered. ‘How could you joke about
that
. About finding your
mum unconscious
.’
    ‘Yeah well, I’m an excellent actor, remember?’ Flynn gave another shrug.
    For a second I felt so furious with him I wanted to scream. Then I caught the slight tremble of his mouth and I suddenly realised that he hadn’t been joking at all. His reaction had been
totally genuine and now he was pretending because he hated that I’d seen how upset he’d been.
    ‘Stop making out it didn’t affect you.’ Tears leaked from my eyes. Why couldn’t he just admit how hurt he had felt? Why was it always so hard to get him to open up?
‘Whatever you say, it was a big deal, how your mum got beaten up, how your dad nearly . . .’ I couldn’t quite bring myself to say out loud just how close Flynn had come to being
killed when his dad attacked him.
    There was a heavy silence as I walked away and sat down on the end of the bed with my back to him.
    I sat there for a long time, staring at the carpet. At last I felt the bed move as he sat down beside me.
    ‘Making jokes is a way of dealing with it, Riv.’
    I looked at him. ‘Jeez, Flynn. I get that. But you
weren’t
joking, were you?’
    Another long pause. Flynn looked down at the silky blue bedcover between us.
    ‘Siobhan found her first.’ He stopped.
    I glanced at him. He was still staring down at the bed. I sat quite still, waiting.
    ‘I came into the room,’ Flynn went on, his voice hollow, ‘but Siobhan made me go out again. She said Mum was going to be okay. You see, it was Siobhan who saw our dad hit her
and Siobhan who phoned for the ambulance. She was twelve. Too scared to tell the police what had happened. It changed her forever. Before then she was just a bit shy. Afterwards she became like . .
. like this nervous wreck . . .’
    I bit my lip. Flynn lay back on the bed.
    ‘Sometimes I think that what my dad did to Siobhan was worse than what he did to me. You know, actually hurting me.’ He put his hand on his forehead and stared up at the ceiling.
‘I wish I’d been older. Stronger. I wish I’d realised sooner . . .’
    I leaned back beside him and gazed at his profile – at the slope of his nose and the curve of his lip. ‘You did what you could,’ I said softly. ‘You were only a
kid.’
    He turned and looked at me, his eyes unbearably sad.
    ‘It wasn’t enough,’ he said. ‘It just wasn’t enough.’ I stroked his face, wishing I could take away the pain for him.
    Knowing that I couldn’t.
    We fell asleep with our arms wrapped around each other. I had the sense of falling again, falling into him, losing any sense of where I ended and where he began. I woke once in the night and
everything was still. Just the