“Why didn’t you tell us?” Ruth asked finally, and her voice shook.

“Eight months, Claire. Why didn’t you call us?”

“Because he’s your son,” Claire said gently. “It wasn’t my place to tell his parents that he’d done this. It was his.”

And there was another reason, which Claire didn’t say out loud, because it would have sounded like an accusation and Ruth was already drowning.

The truth was that Claire hadn’t been sure whose side they’d take. In her experience, families closed ranks around their own blood when it came to it, and she had braced herself, over those eight months, for the phone call where Ruth and George would gently explain that there were two sides to everything, that Jason was a good boy really, that maybe if Claire had been more understanding.

She had not called them because she could not bear to find out that they, too, would choose him.