I coil my arm round her shoulders and guide her towards the fire. ‘Come and sit down. You’re freezing.’ Lexi lowers herself on to the chair. Her bones are thin under my hands, her skin papery and cool to touch. Adam takes off his jacket and drapes it around her shoulders. ‘She shouldn’t even be at school,’ I tell him. ‘Her dad got delayed.’ ‘There was a face,’ Lexi whispers, terrified. ‘Staring in at my window.’ ‘It was probably just a dream,’ Adam says matter-of-factly. ‘Who would be looking in through an upstairs window?’ I recognise the fear in Lexi’s voice, see it sweep across her in waves. Each time she breathes out, her body quivers. ‘There was a man’s face,’ she says. ‘And I wasn’t dreaming. I hadn’t even gone to sleep.’ ‘Not an upstairs window, Adam. Lexi was the last one here so I said she could sleep in a sixth-form room. They get the suites on the ground floor, directly beneath the night matron’s room.’ My voice has thinned and I’m praying the worst isn’t true.
