I wonder why her solitariness makes me feel so much better about myself. Hey, I haven’t done all that badly. Look at my mates. Look how cool they are . I still have that thirteen-year-old-girl thing of wanting to belong, which is ridiculous in a thirty-seven-year-old woman.

We never talk about the thing we did and, most of all, the thing we didn’t do. Our silence about that summer is the thing that binds us together. The reason the four of us are still friends twenty-five years later.

When Maddie returned to the kitchen after five minutes, Sonia was reaching up into the top cupboard to put away a packet of Coco Pops and Maddie was in possession of a leaflet for summer camp , and a piece of knowledge that she intended to use later if she needed it.

A world in which friends played fun tricks on one another was all very well in theory – it was the kind of thing she lapped up in books – but she wasn’t at all sure she liked it in practice. After all, it meant it could happen to you at any point. And you might not find the trick fun at all.

As if secrets somehow lose their power with time. But the opposite is true – the longer you keep a secret, the more potent it becomes. The harder it is to imagine ever revealing it.

Blaming yourself doesn’t mean you’re guilty. We blamed ourselves. With good reason. Perhaps, after all, blame does mean you’re guilty; it’s just a question of what you’re guilty of.

...how can you let the dead bury their dead when they might not be dead at all?

Maddie was fearless. That was what they all said. The trouble with fearless people, Lucy thought, was that they sometimes did very dangerous things.

She hovered awkwardly beside him. She didn’t have long. But something about the way he’d said he didn’t want to be alone made it impossible to leave him. He looked at her properly then. Brown eyes with big dark circles under them.