I had ignored my alarm much longer than were wise — we were running late again. My fingers were clumsy as I knotted Iris's uniform tie, which she still couldn't do without it looking a mess. 'I don't have time to braid it today,' I apologised as I finished brushing her hair. 'We're leaving in ten minutes. Ten minutes, Iris, not twelve, not fifteen.'

I still walked Iris to school then though she were old enough to go by herself just because she were so easily distracted that I couldn't trust she wouldn't start chasing a squirrel and be three hours late. I waited for confirmation that she understood before I hurried down the stairs. Stuffing a cold sausage roll into my mouth, I packed her lunch and microwaved a cornish pasty for her to eat for breakfast on the way.

At the threshold to the living room, my legs filled with lead and I had to force myself to step over it like I was dragging my own dead body with me. Má's face were pale in the glow of the telly, so close to a skull that I could've thought she were dead if it weren't for the steady rise and fall of her breaths.

Má had been sacked again so she were weird again, or maybe she were weird and that's why she were sacked. Either way, she hadn't left the sofa for days.

I approached tentatively, as though she'd attack if I made sudden movements, and lowered myself to the edge of the sofa by her cold feet. I tucked her throw blanket around them though.

'Má?' I waited for a sign of life but she didn't even seem to hear me. I placed a hand on her shoulder and when it elicited no response, shoved gently. Her dull eyes slugged to me. 'Can you make dinner today? I can't cause I've college and then I've football so I won't be home till nine.'

I waited. Nowt.

'Má? Are you listening? You have to get Iris food cause she's eight and she'll eat Maltesers for dinner. Okay?'

Má did summat that might've been a nod but the dread in me only swelled.

'Where are you?' Her voice scraped through a dry throat so harrowingly empty, a shiver yanked at my spine.

'I'm right here, Má.'

'You're home less.'

I plummeted. Or at least my stomach did. For a moment, I thought she were kicking me out, that she'd found out about Dominic, about me, that he'd finally pumped me so full of shame that it split over for her to see. Then I realised she said home less, not homeless.

That didn't ease my pattering heart much. 'I've got work, haven't I?'

I did have work. I had asked to return to my old summer job at the Seven Eleven near school for a few nights a week — I had thought it would help with her stress but she hardly notices. Still, the real reason I'd been home less were Dominic. The thought of her finding out lifted my voice at least an octave.

Her eyes cut to me. I had become so used to their glaze that when she focused on me for the first time in days, she might as well have thrown a harpoon through my head. 'You think I'm a bad mother.'

Instinctively, I flinched away and though it was only a centimetre or two, she noticed. Fuck. 'No. Má, I'm sorry.' I knew the apologies were futile; it would take me days to make up for recoiling from her like that.

'Your Bà Nội thinks so.' Her voice were so shrill, I had to fight the urge to cover my ears. Má sat up, invigorated by her anger. 'She wants to take you from me. Is that where you go? You go conspire with her on how she can take you from me.'

Words died before they reached my lips. I opened and closed my mouth like a fish. It must've made me look guilty because Má seized me by the shoulders.

'You're my kids. My kids. Not hers. I'm your mother.'

'I know that.'

'You want to live with her.' She ignored me vigorously shaking my head and the ropes of denial I spewed. 'She could buy you iPods and Xbox and whatever you want. Don't look at me like I'm crazy, Dean!'

It weren't the first time she thought I were Ba, not even the first time she'd thought so in such quick succession to calling me her son. Everyone did tell me we looked the same, that I could be mistaken for his ghost. Maybe that's why none of them could stand having me around: I'd always be nowt but a reminder of their pain.

I shook my head. 'I'm on your side, Má.'

As if they were an enchantment, she softened. A smile bloomed on her face and, pressing a kiss to my forehead, she pulled me into her arms. I allowed her to embrace me even as screaming echoed in my head.

Her arms slid from me as she lay back down. It were like watching the slow but unavoidable seeping of red wine into a white carpet, the way her eyes found the TV screen and drifted out of focus.

I asked though I knew it were useless. 'Will you remember to cook?'

            'Have you ever heard of parentification? Or emotional incest?'

Hollowing my cheeks, I bite the insides. The comfort I were just starting to feel with therapy has been replaced with a buzz in my knees; it takes immense effort not to run out. I'm here to talk about Dominic, not Má.

I shake my head at the Best of Nahid Akhtar record on the wall because I can't bring myself to look at Dr Qureshi.

'It happens when the roles of child and parent blur. The child is made responsible for the parent and the parent treats their child almost like a partner, needing them for support in a way that is inappropriate to ask of one's child,' he explains. 'Do you feel that that's true for you?'

'No.'

Humming, Dr Qureshi writes summat down, asks, 'Are you sure?' and rage wakes up in my chest with an explosion that reaches the tips of my fingers.

'She's not a bad mum!'

He looks up, though if he's surprised by my abrupt flip into anger, he don't show it.

'She's not a bad mum,' I repeat, struggling to breathe through the smoke that fills me. 'She just has a lot on her plate. And she's well depressed and that. She lost her husband and her mum within a year of each other — she don't have anyone else. Of course, I help her.'

Dr Qureshi offers me a gentle smile. 'I understand. But that doesn't mean that you deserved to be treated the way you were... You also lost your father and grandmother within a year of each other. It doesn't seem like you've ever had room to grieve.'

I scoff though it only brings the flavour of summat rotten to my mouth.

'Parentification is often traumatic for the child–'

'I weren't traumatised by having to take my sister to school. My grandparents were in a literal war.'

He smiles kindly. 'We call that complex trauma: reoccurring events that build up to become traumatising even if they don't sound, to the average person, as something traumatic.'

Crossing my arms, I shake my head and turn to the swing set outside his window. Now that it's late summer, his garden is an explosion of green and I lose myself observing the magpie hopping around the lawn.

Until Dr Qureshi tugs me back into the room. 'The reason it's important we talk about this is that it's likely your home situation made it easier for Dominic to take advantage of you.'

My eyes flick from the window to the russet brown of his. 'It's not my mum's fault.' It's my fault. I'm desperate for attention. I'll take it from anywhere. Iris is right: it's a miracle Ziri found me because I'd be so easy to kill.

'I'm not saying it was her fault,' Dr Qureshi says patiently. 'But not getting enough love or attention from home made you vulnerable to someone like Dominic, who could easily swoop in like a knight in shining armour — nobody could blame you for wanting that.'

Residual anger burns under my skin, unless that embarrassment. I sink into the retro armchair only to sit up and down a glass of water. I drink half of another before my body returns to equilibrium.

Dr Qureshi waits for me to settle. 'I know you said last time that you don't have "that kind of relationship", but have you considered telling your mother about this?'

'I can't tell her.'

'Why not?'

'It'll make her feel bad. And I'm on her side.'

His brow furrows. 'You say that a lot, that you're on her side. What does that mean?'

'That I'm on her side.'

'But... in what?'

'Everything.'

'Did you feel like you needed to take sides a lot as a child? You've mentioned that your parents fought often.' When I don't answer, he rephrases, 'What sort of things did they fight about?'

I'm taken back to one of the many arguments, full of words I didn't understand and only retroactively coloured in. It were about her hoarding and paranoia, like most of their fights.

Má insisted that Ba didn't understand, that his family was wealthy enough even after taxes by the French colonizers and then taxes by the Japanese colonizers to leave Vietnam as soon as Europe was safe to flee to, that they weren't around to experience the war, the broken bodies and poisoned earth. His family came to France and then to England with still enough money to live a life as comfortable as anyone in the forties could expect.

Ba said that she were born in England just as he were, that they were both born in Leeds General Infirmary, and that it were disrespectful of her to appropriate her family's suffering — his family's suffering, because he, too, had aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents who left Vietnam only by dying — and weaponise it in such trivial arguments.

I sat at the table in front of a cold meal until Má crouched beside me. You're on my side, aren't you? You're on Má's side, aren't you, Thỏ? He don't understand.

I nodded. But what did an eight-year-old understand about war and trauma that infects genetics like a weed? How do you kill a weed when it was herbicide that put it there?

'You weren't like this before.' I've lost focus, my mind is staying to the attic, and my voice might as well be Ba's. 'My dad used to say that a lot, "You weren't like this before". Whatever's wrong with her, I think it started when she were pregnant. So it's my fault.'

'No, Miles–'

I dig my fingernail into the inflamed wound on my thumb. It got worse over my two weeks staying with Má, worse than it ever was before. 'Everyone's always against her —  my dad, his parents, my sister. So I have to be on her side. She's not got anyone else, has she?'

'You're very protective of her. That's honourable, really, but you can't protect her to the extent that it hurts you.' Dr Qureshi's voice is especially kind but I don't focus my eyes. The decorations are blurs on his emerald walls.

'You have to allow hurt and love to coexist,' he continues. 'We often believe that they're antitheses of each other, that if someone loves you, they won't hurt you and if someone hurts you, they don't love you. But unfortunately, that doesn't fit reality. I have no doubt that you love your mother and that she loves you, but you have to acknowledge that she has hurt you or you'll never recover from it.

'It sounds like you have a very co-dependent relationship — what that means is that she needs you and you need to be needed. You have to actively avoid that with your boyfriend because it certainly has the potential to end up there if you don't start viewing yourself as more than a caretaker. You're an equal partner in that relationship, Miles, and you have to believe yourself worthy of that.'

My childhood — my whole life — is unravelling and Dr Qureshi is happy to pull on the string. I'll let my fingers get cut off trying to hold it together.

I shake my head.

Dr Qureshi flips through his notes to the first few pages. He's past halfway in the thread-bound notebook. Have we really been doing this so long already? The moment I have the thought I counter it: it's more surprising that he hasn't gone through five notebooks by now.

'Sometimes I feel like my mum's my wife,' he reads. 'You said that in our second session.'

I stab the wound again. When did I say that? Have I been here slagging off my parents every time and then I can't even remember it?

'When did you start self-harming?'

The question shocks me out of my emotional turmoil. I blink Dr Qureshi's mustard yellow glasses and salt-and-pepper beard back into focus. 'What?' He nods at my thumb and I remove my index fingernail from the wound. 'That's not...'

'What would you call it?'

'Not that!' I say. 'It's not, like– I mean, it's one thumb.'

His face is pulled taut though he's no less kind in his seriousness. 'Not all self-harm methods are potentially fatal — it can be something as simple as showering at a temperature higher than comfortable.'

'But it's not — I only do it when I say or think summat stupid.' I say this with great conviction only to realise I've just admitted him right. I tuck my hands under my thighs. It's the only way I've ever known how to deal with conflict: kick it under the fridge like a dropped ice cube.

My leg starts to bounce and I have no hope of stopping it. I check the clock — thankfully we're almost out of time. 'I'm gonna be in Leeds for a week for my dad's death anniversary so I won't be able to make it again until second week of July.'

'We could meet over the phone–?'

'No!' The back of my neck burns from my interruption and I toy with my earring. 'Sorry. Just, what you said about an environment where I feel safe, I've not got owt like that in Leeds. I don't wanna go through all this when I'm there.'

He's angry with me. He'll tell me to find another therapist and quit wasting his time–

'That's great, Miles — you're already setting boundaries. 'Giving me a smile, he checks his planner. 'What about Friday, July fifteenth? Are you free then?'