I made it to the bottom almost without making a sound, and stood there by the front door, feeling the slight draught of cool night air on my bare feet. I was holding my breath and listening, and I could still hear nothing, and I wondered if the sound of the front door closing had after all been part of a dream. Or maybe it was the reality, and all the rest had been a dream. Maybe Dad had come home and woken me up, and everything I thought had happened in the last week had never happened. But the living room was empty, and the table was bare, apart from the unread bills still scattered on it. No crappy old laptop, no pile of notes, no Dad. The movement behind me was so stealthy it might have been a spider’s scuttle but I heard it all the same and turned and registered the hand rising under my jaw and slapped it away, and whatever it was that hand had been holding flew across the pitch-black room and hit the wall, and at the same time a sledgehammer hit me in the solar plexus, driving all the breath from my body.
