If you had told me a year ago that I would ever find something Holly-Anne Sullivan said to me comforting, I would laugh in your face.

But then, if you’d told me a year ago that I’d be dating Finn Blacklin, that he was a fairy prince, and that I might never see him again because his brother had stolen him away, then I …

Honestly, I don’t know what I would do. Back away slowly. Not make any sudden movements.

The Pearl of a year ago might have expected to be here right now, on Christmas Eve, eating breakfast with Disey and Shad and Phil. But she wouldn’t have expected it to be like this.

She would have expected it to be … loud. She would have expected there to be laughing. She would have expected it to be easy.

Phil sits beside me, but I’m not entirely sure she knows I’m there. She’s mechanically spooning cereal into her mouth, and I find myself counting the beats. One spoon up, two spoon down, three four five six seven eight rest, one spoon up, two spoon down.

‘How’s Finn?’ Disey asks me.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘He’s, um … well, he’s … you know.’

‘Did you two have a good night last night?’

‘Not really,’ I reply.

It’s honest no matter which Finn you’re talking about. Tam threatened to kill me, and Finn was conspicuously absent from my dreams.

Shad raises his eyebrows. ‘Is he treating you –’

‘God, stop, please,’ I say. ‘Finn and I are – we’re – don’t worry about us. It’s just … hard to have a good night right now.’

Shad looks like he wants to say something else, but I’m 99 per cent sure Disey kicks him under the table.

Phil eats her last mouthful of cereal (one spoon up, two spoon down). ‘I’m going to go back to bed for a little while,’ she says. ‘Is that all right?’

‘Of course it is,’ Disey says. ‘You can do whatever you want, Phil. I know your uncle Marcos wanted to come by today and –’

‘I don’t want to see him.’

‘Then you don’t have to.’

‘Is there anyone you do want to see?’ I ask.

‘No,’ she says shortly, and leaves. A few seconds later, I hear the guest bedroom door snick shut behind her.

‘Is that really the best idea?’ Shad asks Disey. ‘Letting her sleep all day?’

‘She’s grieving.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘I’m not going to be the kind of person that tells anyone they’re doing grief wrong,’ Disey says. ‘Remember when Mum died? Remember how many opinions got thrown at us about what we should be doing and how we should be feeling? Remember how useless they all were?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I remember.’

This sounds kind of terrible, but I’ve never put a lot of thought into what it must have been like for Disey and Shad when our mother died. I was only four when it happened and I don’t remember her much, but they were twenty-one, so it was a whole different story for them.

I’ve thought a lot about what it must have been like for them to suddenly have me on their hands – to be twenty-one and suddenly be raising your kid sister – but I don’t think I’ve ever properly thought about why that happened. About what it must be like to lose your mother like they did. Like Phil has.

Maybe it’s because it’s the kind of thing that’s too painful to think about. If someone took Disey or Shad away from me, I don’t think I’d survive it.

Judging by the things they’ve told me, she wasn’t a very good mother. She was distant and neglectful and self-involved, always trying to make it as a singer, not really thinking about her kids, always off in her own little world. It’s hard to imagine grieving for someone like that, but they must have. Of course, they must have. She was their mother, for God’s sake.

And they can’t have been the only ones grieving for her. The tattoo of her name across Mr Hunter’s chest floats through my mind.

Another thing on the list of things I have to think about – AKA the list of things that I refuse to think about until I get Finn back.

Disey drains her coffee. ‘I’m going to work for a bit,’ she says. ‘It’s a half day today because of the Christmas break, so they’re booting us out at lunch. I’ll be back this afternoon.’

‘Dise,’ Shad says, ‘leave Helena alone, okay?’

Disey sets down her coffee cup with an audible clunk. ‘So did I miss the bit where you got answers from her about how she set Pearl up with a job with a serial killer?’

‘Matilda isn’t a serial killer!’ I say.

‘I’ll talk to her,’ Shad says to Disey. ‘Privately. Properly. And I’ll actually listen to what she has to say instead of –’

‘Um, how about you listen to what I have to say?’ I exclaim. ‘Matilda isn’t a killer. I know she’s not.’

‘Pearlie, I know you don’t want to believe that,’ Disey says, ‘but you can’t ignore the evidence. You saw the photo.’

‘Oh yeah, one photo,’ I snap. ‘A photo that could have been anything.’

Shad exhales and pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘That’s not all there is, kid.’

‘… what?’ I say faintly.

‘I heard from my police contact late last night,’ Disey says. ‘I … Pearlie, you don’t need to worry about this. You just need to worry about yourself, and about keeping Phil together.’

‘Tell me!’

‘They found the murder weapon,’ she says. ‘In Matilda’s car, in the backseat with Mr Hunter. It was an iron knife.’

‘So?’ I say. ‘She makes those.’

‘Exactly,’ Disey says. ‘And it looks like it matches the wounds on Mrs Kostakidis’s body.’

I open my mouth, then close it again.

Of course it matches the wounds. Because it’s not Matilda’s knife. It’s a Rider’s knife. Hunter’s.

In the midst of incredible panic and massive blood loss, I somehow managed to perfectly frame Matilda for murder. Like, I could have plotted and planned for weeks and not come up with anything better.

I bury my face in my hands. Shad reaches over and puts his hand on my back. ‘I know this is rough, kiddo,’ he says. ‘But –’

‘She didn’t do it,’ I say. ‘I’m right. I swear. She didn’t do it.’

‘I’m so sorry, Pearlie,’ Disey says, ‘but yes, she did.’

When Disey finally leaves for work and Shad goes to catch a few hours’ sleep – both with strict admonishments to call or wake them if the police want to question Phil or me again – all the good that a solid night’s sleep and that ship-steadying conversation with Holly-Anne did has been undone. I’m exhausted and I’m worried and I feel terrible about Matilda and I’m so, so scared.

But I have to work out how to tear a hole in the universe if I want to fix even the tiniest bit of it.

Usually my first step when faced with fairy problems is to google stuff. I’ve had various levels of success – it turns out Wikipedia is a valuable source, despite what Ms Rao tells us in Modern History – but somehow I suspect that ‘how do I rip a hole in space and time to save my boyfriend?’ is not going to work out too well for me. I’d just end up on a bunch of, like, particle physics sites, and I highly doubt that I can manage to build a Large Haylesford Collider. Especially given that I now have no income, what with my boss being in jail and all.

Plus, I don’t know if the science has been invented yet that can come close to matching up to what fairies can do.

If I can’t open the door to fairyland, I need someone to open it for me. Which means a fairy.

I have access to exactly one. Emily.

That presents a host of problems, because a) I don’t know where she is, b) tentative friendship aside, there’s no way Holly is going to tell me where she is, and c) even if I managed to find Emily, she’d murder everyone.

I’m halfway towards thinking that she might be worth a shot anyway, before I realise that there’s also a d): I don’t think Emily can open the door by herself.

If she could, it would have made her life a whole lot easier. Instead of being all, ‘The door will open on the Summer Solstice! You will step through it with me then, Valentine, and we will live happily ever after in our magical fairytale kingdom!’, she would have just kidnapped me and held me to ransom. She would have given Finn a choice: go through the door or Pearl dies. And he would have gone through the door, she’d have followed him, and slammed it behind them.

So no. Even my one terrible option isn’t an option.

I have a nasty suspicion that there’s exactly one person who controls the Summer Door. The one that wants to bring all the Seelie fairies home so he can slam all the doors shut forever. The one that said that Finn would never see me again. The one that laughed in my face when I called him a liar.

He’s the last person on earth I’d be able to manipulate into doing what I want him to do. Except he isn’t even that, because he isn’t actually on earth for me to try.

My hands are shaking again.

No. No. I’m not giving up. Remember what Matilda said. Whoever told you not to listen when someone said something’s impossible did a wonderful job.

I broke apart the Riders. Me. It was supposed to be impossible, and I did it. If I did that, I can do this –

Wait. Riders.

Riders could hunt their quarry through Seelie-land, Unseelie-land, or the human world. They weren’t allowed to cross between the different worlds once they were unleashed, but they must have had some way of getting from A to B in the first place, right? Like, when they were set free in Seelie-land and they killed Finn’s fairy dad, I doubt he was waiting politely at one of the doors for them to knock so he could let them in.

They must have a way.

And I know a Rider who owes me big-time.

You know what sucks? Comas.

You know what also sucks? Rules.

I spent about three tenths of a second going ‘Hmmm, considering hardly anything stands between me and being arrested as Matilda’s murder apprentice, rushing to the hospital to see the dude who was supposed to be her latest victim is maybe not my best idea ever’ before I was grabbing Shad’s car keys and racing to the hospital. I knew Shad was going to be annoyed with me for taking off, and that risking a bunch of demerit points by exceeding the speed limit for P-plates was not the best idea I’d ever had – just look like more of a criminal to the police, Pearl, I dare you – but I barely cared. I felt like I was flying. Like I’d cracked it. Like I’d won.

But they wouldn’t let me see him.

‘Mr Hunter,’ I said desperately to the nurse. ‘He would have been brought in yesterday morning. I need to see him.’

‘Visiting hours are two until four,’ the nurse replied absently.

‘It’s urgent!’

He looked up at me disapprovingly. ‘Are you family?’

‘No – yes – kind of,’ I improvise. ‘We’re not blood relatives, but he was close with my mother before she died! He’s – he’s a father figure to me.’

He raises an eyebrow. ‘He’s like your dad and you call him Mr Hunter?’

‘He’s also my music teacher. Habit, you know?’

The nurse clearly doesn’t believe me, but he goes through some files and picks up one marked Hunter, D. ‘There’s no one listed here as next of kin.’

‘Please. I need to see him.’

‘Young lady, he’s unconscious. He’s been unconscious since he was brought in, and we don’t know when he’s going to wake up. You’re not listed as family, I’m not going to let you in to see him, and you making a commotion is going to help absolutely no one.’

‘Is there someone else I can speak to? I was a patient here a while ago. I was in a coma too. I know what he’s going through. Maybe I can –’

‘Miss,’ the nurse says, ‘you need to leave. Now. Before I call security.’

I feel like a deflated balloon as I drive home. Not a balloon someone’s stuck a pin in and popped, but one that’s been hanging for three days near some sad crepe paper streamers with the air seeping out slowly, so that it’s a miserable, shrivelled little thing. The kind of balloon that some wanky photographer would take a photo of in black and white and then name Desolation or something.

This is not how things are supposed to go. The big lead that’s going to crack the case for you isn’t supposed to dry up immediately. You’re not supposed to be prevented from getting the information you need because of basic institutional administration. I should have been able to walk in there, sit down at Hunter’s bedside, take his hand, and have him magically wake up right then and there.

Pearl? he would say.

I’m here, I’d reply. I need you to tell me everything.

And he’d tell me exactly what I needed to know about opening the doors between worlds. He’d pull another magic Rider knife from somewhere, which he’d press into my hand. This is what you need to know to kill a fairy, he’d say, and he’d tell me just how to make the Crown Prince bleed. I’d stand up to march out of there to go and save Finn, and he’d say wait, and I’d turn, and –

About your mother, he’d say. And about your twin.

He’d tell me it all. I would know everything, how to go to fairyland and save Finn and my sister and the others, instead of knowing nothing and being back to – no, not even square one. Square negative eleven. Thousand.

Come on, Linford. Focus. It was a long shot anyway. What, did you think that if you got in to see Hunter he’d just miraculously wake up?

I need a Plan B.

Okay. I need to go through all those fairy websites I have bookmarked and look for some story – any story – where a human manages to break into fairyland.

I grab my phone. Sit on my bed. Open my web browser app, and –

It’s hopeless.

No, it’s not. It’s not hopeless. It’s not impossible. Matilda said I was good at not listening to people who said things were impossible.

She’s in jail.

Because of me. Because I called her and made her come and help me, because I’m too useless and stupid to do things on my own.

If I hadn’t thrown Phil through the door into fairyland when the Riders came – if I’d thought for two seconds about different ways to keep her safe while Finn and I brought Mr Hunter back to life – then Finn wouldn’t have needed to follow her. The prince wouldn’t have got either of them. Phil’s mother would still be dead, but Finn would be here with me.

He’d be holding my hand, wrapping his arms around me, and I could close my eyes, and just for a second, I could be weak. I could let him take some of this on, let him carry it, let him carry me, and I could close my eyes and I could think and I could find the loose thread and pull until the whole thing unravels and everything’s all right again.

But he’s gone, and it’s my fault, and Phil’s broken, and it’s my fault, and Matilda’s in jail, and it’s my fault, and I’m not alone, I’m not the only one in this up to my neck, but it’s my fault.

So fix it. Fix it. Get Finn back. Get him back, and let him put his magic powers to work.

I lean my head back against my pillows, trying to blink the tears away.

Get him back. Everything will be all right if I can just get him back.