I manage to keep the tears in for a while. They're building up inside me, welling in my eyes as we drive to the station to give our statements. I blink them away as I tell a steely eyed officer called Diane Matthews what happened and she silently listens, recording it on some revise. She turns to leave me with nothing but a box of tissues in the interview room, telling me that she's going to call home for me.

"Can I have one of your parents' number?" she asks.

I give her Dave's. Mum will still be in town with Alfie, shopping and having fun. She'll panic when she hears and when Mum is stressed, it spreads to Alfie like a contagious disease and anyway, Dave is closer.

"Can I go sit with Ravi?" I ask.

Diane pauses. "Yeah, okay."

Ravi and I both end up in what I think is where the officers have lunch. There's a vending machine in the corner and a coffee machine and something that resembles the serving station in the school canteen. Ravi seems to have lost all his levelheadedness, he's silently chewing his nails, eyes wide.

"Did they make you sign a thing too?" I ask.

He nods. "God, this is all so twisted."

We sit in silence for a while more after that.

"Eve, your dad's here?" Diane pokes her head in, sensible hair a little messy.

I grit my teeth and nod. She phrased it like a fucking question. People don't understand how Dave and I are connected. They don't see how a tall guy from Vietnam can be the father to a redheaded girl with pale skin. We don't make sense to them until Mum is with us, her copper coloured hair matching mine and serving as an explanation. But Dave us one of my favourite people, he has been since I was seven.

It was flu season and my not-so-lovely class partner Marcus had given me his flu. Which was incredibly inconvenient for Mum whose stupid boss (she had called him much worse things behind his back) would not let her off and she'd run out of leave for the year.

"Just call Dave," I suggested, lifting my head from the toilet since I was being sick.

"I can't just call Dave!" Mom protested.

"Well then I'll call him!" I stood up and washed my hands with love heart liquid soap from Superdrug and snatched her phone.

I'll admit it, I'd liked Dave from the start. Unlike Mom's other boyfriends, he seemed genuinely interested in me. When my birthday had come the first August they'd been dating, he'd actually got me a proper present and not just some generic little girl gift. It had been three detective books that I still have, set in the 1940s at a preppy girls boarding school which I devoured in two days. He'd also got me a Sherlock hat that I still have too.

"Hey, love," Dave said when he answered the phone.

"It's Eve," I told him, running out of the bathroom away from Mom.

"Hey, kid," he replied. "Where's your mum? And you sound a bit poorly, everything okay?"

"She has to go to work but I have the flu," I explained, flopping down on the living room sofa. "So can you come look after me today or do you have to go to work too?" I was using that wheedling voice, the kind that never worked on my own dad.

"I can work from your place," he said after a few seconds. "Yeah, that'll work. I'll be there in fifteen, okay?"

Mom was secretly pleased, I could tell. Dave came armed with DVDs and books and his laptop so he could work from our kitchen table, promising Mom he'd take care of me. And he did. Once Mom left, he showed me a box of Mr Freeze tiptops that he'd picked up for me which sealed the deal for me.

"I love you, Dave," I told him, taking out a strawberry flavoured one.

And the rest was history.

Dave included me in every major decision, telling me weeks beforehand about him proposing to Mom and the surprise honeymoon trip to Paris. He made sure I was okay with moving from our flat to a new house. He asked me before coming to parents evening with Mom.

But that isn't the best thing about Dave, his insistence that I have a say in everything. The best thing is how we can go to all the Marvel films together and watch Sherlock for hours together and how he'll revise with me and teach me how to make waffles and laugh when I burn them. The best thing is how he never tried to replace my dad, but carved his own space in my heart for him.

So when I see him walk into the room, I burst into tears.

"Eve!" He rushes to me and folds me into a hug. "Oh, sweetheart."

Ravi's mom arrived just a few minutes later, a tall woman in a tan trench coat who looks important with a capital I. And seeing her makes Ravi burst into tears too, clinging to his mom like I'm clinging to Dave.

"Josh is dead," I whisper into his shoulder.

Dave was there when I came home from that party, crying my eyes out. He and Mom sat with me for hours with a tub of vanilla ice cream and comforting words and hot chocolate as I cried over my first failed relationship. He's always there for all the important moments. Leaving Year Six, Year Seven Induction Day, my dance shows, my first breakup and my first boyfriend's death.

I cry harder.

"I know," he whispers, hugging me close and his own voice cracking a bit. "I know, Eve."