‘Something you have to know. She’s torturing us, but she’s telling the truth.’ Her ghost-child grandmother had disappeared up ahead of them somewhere, but Deirdre felt listened to, spied upon, constrained. And – disloyal. ‘I could tell you her story. I know it backwards. I’ve heard it over and over, again and again, the same terrible tales, until I thought I would go mad from hearing them. ‘But none of the details really matter. Only one thing matters, Gal: that poor little frightened girl – that poor little frightened girl inside my grandmother. Do you see what I mean?’ Gal’s face was stony. That poor little frightened girl was the monster he wanted to free Deirdre from. His anger was too deep and too well justified to forgive her so easily. Deirdre gazed into his eyes. Then she sighed. ‘My grandmother,’ she began, ‘was born in Corbenic, when Corbenic was still a house, before her father built the rest of the flats around it.
