Posting the keys through her own letterbox was a pretty rubbish out-of-body experience.

Like finding her name in someone else’s address book, seeing her face in the background of a stranger’s photo, or really smelling the inside of her elbow; for a second, less perhaps, Hanna was no longer herself. She was witnessing herself from the outside. She was noticing herself, without really being herself.

Hanna had forgotten about the keys until they’d driven to the end of the road. After three hours of loading up a rented Luton van with just enough laundry bags to bring on an attack of self-loathing, she and her father had finally turned the corner and were out of sight when she felt the small prick of recognition. In her thigh. The clutch of keys, held together with a silver ring in the shape of a turtle, was pressing into her leg with an insistence that felt almost like an accusation. She’d put her hand on the dashboard, like a driving instructor preparing to fail a quaking seventeen-year-old, and whispered, ‘Stop.’ Her dad, thinking she was referring to the cheese and brinjal pickle sandwich he’d started to eat with only one hand on the wheel, slipped the offending item into his door pocket.

‘No. Stop the car. I’ve forgotten something.’

Book of the week: read an extract of Square One by Nell Frizzell