She'd been desperate. She was in despair. She didn't have any other options.

It had sounded like an offer too good to refuse.

Of course, it was anything but.

Mrs Turner had suggested that it would be good for Alex – Alistair – to have a few weeks, an adjustment period, when he didn't see her. As intelligent as they both knew he was, any child his age would need time to realise that he had a new mother now.

The plan had been made very clear to her: for one month, she was not allowed upstairs, and Alex – Alistair – was not allowed downstairs. I think I can handle a month, Mrs Turner had said, in that condescending tone that told her that Mrs Turner clearly saw the motherly side of mothering as the easy part.

They'd decided – she was told – that it would be a good idea to slowly reintroduce her to the boy. She would start with simply taking the meals upstairs, and every few days she would be involved in a new part of her son's new routine.

Of course, it didn't all go to plan. The first day she brought tea upstairs, it was to Mrs Turner and Alex – Alistair – who were working on something she knew she'd never be able to understand.

Alex's little face had lit up as soon as she appeared in the doorway. He had never really got the hang of speaking, something which she blamed herself for, but he grinned and toddled over to her. His little arms wrapped around her legs and she felt her heart break.

"Alistair," Mrs Turner said, her voice stern. "Come here. Come to your mother."

Alex looked up at her, confusion written on his face. It was clear that he understood the words but not their meaning.

She looked up fearfully, her gaze meeting Mrs Turner's razor-sharp glare. They'd made a deal. She had to honour that.

"Go to your mother, Alistair," she said, her voice shaking, continuing to serve the tea.

The second the door shut behind her she leant against it, letting the tears run freely as she took deep, shuddering breaths.

Alistair grew up quickly. She'd always known that intellectually he was far superior to the greatest minds she could imagine, and she'd known that she hadn't been able to give him much of a childhood. Perhaps it would have been foolish to assume that Mrs Turner would make every effort to give him the childhood he deserved.

By the time he was ten, he'd been self-sufficient for years. After he turned six Mrs Turner stopped insisting that he had all of his meals in the dining room with her and Mr Turner. If she tried to tell him to join them for breakfast, he would simply wake up before them and have breakfast in the kitchen before joining them in the kitchen and declaring that he wasn't hungry. So they compromised. Alistair would have breakfast in the kitchen, lunch at school, and dinner in the dining room.

The school insisted that he play sports, but he never did well on a team. Even the brightest children his age did not like it when he explained to them the most energy-efficient way of swinging a cricket bat, and his loathing for physical contact meant that playing rugby was out of the question. He was eight when the school games instructor suggested that he simply run during their lessons. He wasn't particularly good at it, not to begin with, but it was a challenge both intellectually and physically. Could he find his optimum speed? Could he improve on his fastest times according to the data he had collected and his projections for his own progress?

She thought it was wonderful. Running was something she could understand, something that you didn't have to be the genius he was to know at least something about. For the first time she was able to ask questions about what he was doing, she was able to say something that wasn't a question about how his day went. It was obvious that the hour of enforced solitude that rapidly became a daily habit was good for him.

Mrs Turner, of course, had objected as soon as she found out. Alistair shouldn't be wasting his time running, she'd said, especially after he began spending every lunchtime on the school field, running around in circles. After all, he could be spending that time working, reading, expanding his mind.

After a few weeks, he began to sleep better. A week after that, his academic work improved from outstanding to phenomenal. Mrs Turner agreed that he should be allowed to keep running.

He never stopped.

A few weeks after he turned eleven, she called him Alex – a slip of the tongue. She'd expected him to be confused, to ask her if she'd simply been thinking of someone else.

Instead he said, "I don't like the name Alistair. I much prefer Alex."

She wasn't sure what to say to that.

"Did you used to call me that?"

It was clear that to Alex this was simply an innocent question, but her eyes widened with worry nonetheless. Had she really thought they'd be able to keep it a secret from him forever?

As advanced as Alex was intellectually, he still wasn't good a conversation, and obviously did not know how to interpret her silence.

"I can remember you calling me that. When I was very young."

"I did," she said, trying her best to appear casual and nostalgic.

"Lots of people think I'm not very good with people," he said, matter-of-fact, as he watched her busy herself in what she was cooking. "I know I can be quite difficult sometimes. Some people are easier than others."

It was clear that he didn't want a response, so she didn't give one. She simply carried on with her job, desperately hoping that she was allowed to tell her son that it was alright, that it didn't matter.

"You should go upstairs," she said instead, as she did every morning. "Your mother will be wondering where you are."

She wondered if Alex knew if it was a dismissal or an encouragement. Sometimes, she wasn't sure herself.

"I will miss you when I go to university."

Fifteen. He was fifteen, and going to university.

She knew that he was more than capable of the work there, even if, as Mrs Turner had put it, 'it's not quite Oxford', he was still going to a fantastic university.

No, it wasn't the work she was worried about.

She herself had never been to university, although she'd known people who did; after all, Alex's father had been a student that she'd met at a party one night through a mutual friend.

One night was a very apt description of their relationship.

University was full of drinking and sex and teenagers trying to work out how to be grown-ups. Learning how long they could leave the washing up before it began to smell, making 'cocktails' out of the remnants of whatever alcohol had been reduced at the nearest off-licence, enjoying their years of being youths before they had to become respectable citizens.

It was no place for a fifteen-year-old.

"I will miss you too," she said, as if it were a secret. And in a way, it was.

She worried. And she worried that Mrs Turner didn't worry. Alex's interaction with his peers so far had been limited to a strict, all-boys environment. It was a world away from a university campus.

"Will you be alright?" she asked, passing him a mug with a steaming hot chocolate – an indulgence usually discouraged by Mrs Turner.

"I don't know," he answered honestly, but he didn't seem concerned.

"There'll be girls," she said, trying to sound like she was teasing him while knowing full well that he could see right through it. "Older girls, so watch out there!"

He looked at her, his eyes as open and honest as they always were. "I do not like girls."

She faltered. "I'm sure you'll change your mind once you get a bit older! No boys your age really like girls."

"You deliberately misunderstand me." His bluntness surprised her. "I have no issue with women. I am simply not attracted to them in a sexual way."

For a few seconds she racked her brains, trying to work out as quickly as she could what the best thing to say would be.

"Good," she said eventually, smiling. "Girls are more trouble than they're worth."

He smiled, and she knew she'd said the right thing. If there even was a right thing.

"Maybe don't tell your mother, though," she warned as an afterthought. "She might not take to the thought of you being… not with a girl."

"Don't worry," Alex said, and he sounded so old and weary. "I had no intention of telling her."

He came downstairs one Saturday that he was home from university, Mrs Turner shouting after him.

"I wanted you to come to my graduation," he stated, ignoring the sounds of Mrs Turner's anger. "She won't allow it. I'm sorry."

"Whatever your mother thinks is best," she said, trying desperately to hide how scared she was. Alex had always been the one thing to protect her from the Turners, from the agents that watched them, and since he'd been gone she had rapidly spiralled into fear and anxiety.

"What Frances thinks shouldn't matter," Alex said, still not raising his voice at all, betraying no emotion. "I am never coming back to this house after I graduate. It's not because of you. You all lied to me, but you did it because you had to. She did it because she wanted to."

In that instant, she knew that he knew. And a few seconds later, he was gone.

That was the last time she ever saw Alistair Turner.

She heard them arguing one evening as she slipped inside the dining hall with their dinner, setting the two plates between Mr and Mrs Turner who were shouting at each other from across the table. It wasn't an uncommon occurrence; she didn't pay it much attention.

"Too smart for his own good," Mr Turner grumbled. "Look how he ended up! You've really done it this time, haven't you, you drove him into this path and now you've ruined us! Ruined us, forever!"

"I did no such thing," Mrs Turner snapped, the smallest trace of a tear in her voice. "It was his own fault. He didn't know when to stop, he found himself in the arms of that – that boy – and now he's dead. It was – it was the boy's fault, I know it. If it hadn't been for that little queer Alistair would still be alive."

There was a deafening crash. Mr and Mrs Turner both turned to face her, a plate shattered on the floor in front of her.

"Pull yourself together," Mrs Turner hissed. For a moment she held Mr Turner's stare, before swiftly turning on her heel and marching out of the room.

It was impossible not to see what had drawn Alex to this boy, to this young man. He saw straight through people in a way that had always eluded Alex. It was hard to see someone who loved her son so obviously, so deeply. She wasn't allowed to show that she'd loved him; Mrs Turner had refused to. To see someone to unabashedly, so unashamedly in love with her son was…

It was everything she'd wanted for him.

It didn't take long for Danny to begin to unravel the tangle of lies that surrounded Alex Turner. Lies that Mrs Turner had taken twenty years painstakingly building, that she'd been forced to participate in. Danny tore through all of them in a matter of hours.

Almost all of them.

He was unsure, that much was obvious. She saw the relief in his eyes when she called him Alex, and she'd wanted to tell him right there and then, he was mine! He's my son, in every way, and I tried, I tried so hard.

But she couldn't.

He worked it out eventually, of course, and a lot faster than she'd thought he would. And it was too much. He was forcing her to confront everything, everything that she'd done wrong, everything that she'd let slip through her fingertips. He had cut through the web of lies but it still existed, it was still there, torn but still obscuring all but the tiniest sliver of truth. It needed to be gone, it needed to be destroyed, it needed to burn.

And burn it did.

She never saw Danny after that day. That was okay; she didn't really want to. He was a reminder of the son she didn't know.

But she told him where to find Alex. Danny deserved that much. Alex deserved that much.

She'd never been much of a mother. But she'd never worked out how to be anything else.

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