She did not pick my bus because she liked it. She picked it because the arithmetic came out right, and because it was the only warm lit room in the borough that a child is allowed to sit in for five hours without anybody asking her to leave.
“It’s the longest one.” She meant the night.
Her mother did not know. I want to be very clear about that, because the easy version of this story has a bad mother in it and that is not the story.
Seren thought her daughter was at a friend’s house on Thursdays. Bronwen told her that. She invented a friend, with a name, and a mum, and a street, and she maintained it for fourteen months so that her mother would not have to know that the dark was a problem.
Ten years old, managing her mother’s shame, on a bus, with a folded timetable.
I drove her home that night at ten past eleven and I sat in the car park until I saw the fourth-floor windows come on, and then I went and sat in my own kitchen until about two in the morning.
Here is what happened after, and some of it is better than I expected and some of it is not.
