He shakes his head with a slow smile. You'd better be right. If the phone rings, I'm unpluggining it, I swear to God-“ You'd do that to your five-year-old sister?“ I gasp in mock outrage. For one whole night alone? Jesus, Maya, I'd sell her to the gypsies!

But I don't want to be fine, not if it means she's going to let go of my hand; not if it means we're going to go back to being polite strangers.

It's horrible being ashamed of someone you care about; it eats away at you. And if you let it get to you, if you give up the fight and surrender, eventually that shame turns to hate.

I am overcome by a feeling of complete detachment. I am a mere object to these people. I am barely human any more.

At the age of five she has already come to terms with one of the life's harshest lessons: that the world isn't fair.

only a matter of time before it broke through our fragile web of denial, forcing us to confront the truth and acknowledge who we are: two people in love – a love that nobody else could possibly understand.

I don't know when it started - this thing - bit it's growing, muffling me, suffocating me like poison ivy. I grew into it. It grew into me. We blurred at the edges, became an amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.