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anything remotely critical about him now that he was dead.
    We sat in silence, chewing our steak.
    ‘I expect you’re itching to get to uni . . .’ my mother said.
    Was my discomfort so obvious?
    The truth was that although I was counting down the hours until the claustrophobia of the holiday would be over, I was also feeling pretty nervous about what was coming next. I thought I’d
probably be OK at Medicine because I was good at Biology and interested in how people worked.
    ‘Which makes you sound like an agony aunt!’ Ross had needled, just the previous November, which now felt like a lifetime ago, because, in a way, it was.
    In spite of his ridicule, or maybe because it had made me think harder, I’d performed well at the interview and been offered a place conditional on achieving three As at A level. But
I’d always felt uneasy about following in my brother’s footsteps. Over that Christmas holiday, I had actually made up my mind to ask if I could defer a year and use the time to decide
if Medicine was what I really wanted to do.
    Then the accident happened.
    When I returned to school the deadline for acceptances was looming. My father had been so proud at the thought of both his sons becoming doctors. Doing Medicine, or at least, not
not
doing it, was the only small way I could begin to make it up to him.
    Only the previous day, calling the school to get my A-level results, with my parents hovering in the hotel corridor just outside the door, a tiny part of me had still been hoping to be granted a
reprieve. But my grades were good enough.
    I realized I hadn’t responded to my mother.
    ‘Yes, really looking forward to it now,’ I assured her.
    At least there would be sex. If Ross’s experience was anything to go by, medics were at it all the time.

3
September 1997
TESS
    On Hope’s first day of school, she was surprisingly amenable to getting dressed in her little grey skirt, white polo top and blue sweatshirt. She ran into Mum’s
room to get a goodbye kiss.
    ‘Take a picture, Tess,’ Mum said.
    We’d decided that Mum wouldn’t even try to come, because then it would become one of Hope’s routines. Hope seemed to accept that I would be the one to go with her. Perhaps it
seemed natural to her, as it wasn’t long since I’d been the one going off to school every morning. I’d been bracing myself for screaming and crying, but as we left the house, and
Mum called down, ‘Bye then!’ it was her little voice that was feeble with tears.
    Mum and Hope were inseparable. Mum was forty-three when she had her. ‘An afterthought,’ was the way she put it, because she would never have said Hope was an accident. With all the
rest of us practically grown up, Mum had had the time to do things like reading library books and baking fairy cakes together. Most people considered Hope spoilt. She’d been a pretty little
baby, with a froth of blonde curls, and, with five big people in the house, six if you included Brendan’s girlfriend Tracy, she’d got a lot of attention. We all loved holding her and
jiggling her to make her smile. People said that’s why she was a bit late with walking and things, because everything was done for her. Mum had tried taking her to nursery school but Hope
wouldn’t be left. She could count to a thousand by the time she was four and could sing all the nursery rhymes, which was probably more than most children of that age.
    She walked with me happily enough and marched over to stand in line with the other tiny children in the playground. I waited by the gate with my fingers firmly crossed, praying that everything
would be fine, and that school would be her protection from everything that was about to happen.
    The perfect silence of those first few seconds after the whistle blew, felt like a gift, a miraculous gift from God who I should not have abandoned. Then a familiar sound tore it apart.
    Mum used to say Hope’s carrying-on was what drove my brothers away. I was