Because here’s the thing. While Mum was getting the barbecue set up Tanzie asked to borrow Mr Nicholls’s computer and looked up the statistics for children of low-income families at private schools. And she saw within a few minutes that the probability of her actually going to St Anne’s had always been in single-figure percentages. And she understood that it didn’t matter how well she had done in that entrance test, she should have checked this figure before they had even left home because you only ever went wrong in life when you didn’t pay attention to the numbers. Nicky came upstairs, and when he saw what she was doing he stood there without saying anything for a minute, then patted her arm and said he would speak to a couple of people he knew in the year below him at McArthur’s to make sure they looked out for her.

When they were at Linzie’s, Dad had told her that private school was no guarantee of success. He’d said it three times. ‘Success is all about what’s inside you,’ he’d said. ‘Determination.’ And then he said Tanzie should get Suze to show her how she did her hair because maybe hers would look nice like that too.

Mum said she would sleep on the sofa that night so that Tanzie and Nicky could have the second bedroom but Tanzie didn’t think she did because she woke up really thirsty in the middle of the night because of Mum’s cooking and she went downstairs and Mum wasn’t there. And in the morning Mum was wearing Mr Nicholls’s grey T-shirt that he wore every single day and Tanzie waited twenty minutes watching his door because she was curious to know what he was going to come down in.

A faint mist hung across the lake in the morning. It rose off the water like a magician’s trick as everyone packed up the car. Norman sniffed around the grass, his tail wagging slowly. ‘Rabbits,’ said Mr Nicholls (he was wearing another grey T-shirt). The morning was chill and grey and the wood pigeons cooed softly in the trees and Tanzie had that sad feeling like you’ve been somewhere really nice and it’s all come to an end.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said quietly, as Mum shut the boot.

She flinched. ‘What, love?’

‘I don’t want to go back home,’ Tanzie said.

Mum glanced at Mr Nicholls and then she tried to smile, walked over slowly and said, ‘Do you mean you want to be with your dad, Tanze? Because if that’s what you really want I’ll –’

‘No. I just like this house and it’s nice here.’ She wanted to say, ‘And there’s nothing to look forward to when we get back because everything is spoiled and, besides, here there are no Fishers,’ but she could see from Mum’s face that that was what she was thinking too, because she immediately looked at Nicky and he shrugged.

‘You know, there’s no shame in having tried to do something, right?’ Mum gazed at them both. ‘We all did our best to make something happen, and it didn’t happen, but some good things have come out of it. We got to see some parts of the country we would never have seen. We learnt a few things. We sorted it out with your dad. We made some friends.’ It’s possible she meant Linzie and her children but her eyes were on Mr Nicholls when she said it. ‘So all in all I think it was a good thing that we tried, even if it didn’t go quite the way we’d planned. And, you know, maybe things won’t be so bad once we get home.’

Nicky’s face didn’t show anything. Tanzie knew he was thinking about all the money.

And then Mr Nicholls, who had said barely anything all morning, walked around the car, opened the door for her and said, ‘Yes. Well. I’ve been thinking about that. And we’re going to make a little detour.’

27.

Jess

They were a muted little group in the car on the way home. Nobody asked to play music, and there was little conversation. Even the dog no longer whined, as if he had accepted that this car was now his home. The whole time Jess had planned the trip, through the strange, frenetic few days of travelling, she had imagined no further than getting Tanzie to the Olympiad. She would get her there, she would sit the test, and everything would be okay. She hadn’t given a thought to the possibility that the entire trip might take three days longer than she had planned or that she would blow the budget in the process. She’d never once considered that they might need to stay somewhere on the way home. Or that she would be left with precisely £13.81 in cash to her name and a bank card that she was too frightened to feed into a cashpoint in case it didn’t come back.

Jess mentioned none of this to Ed. He was silent, his gaze trained on the road ahead, perhaps lost in thoughts of his father. Nicky, behind him, tapped away on Ed’s laptop, ear-buds wedged into his ears, his brow furrowed with concentration. Jess suspected there was some weird gadget of Ed’s that allowed him access to the Internet. She was so grateful that he was talking and eating and sleeping that she didn’t query it. Tanzie was silent, her hand resting on Norman’s great head, her eyes fixed on the speeding landscape through the window. Whenever Jess asked her if she was okay, she would simply nod.

None of it seemed to matter as much as it should. Because something fundamental had shifted in her.

Ed. Jess repeated his name silently in her head until it ceased to have any real meaning. She sat inches from this man, who, she now understood, was quite simply the greatest man she had ever known. She was only surprised that nobody else seemed to have realized it. When he smiled, Jess couldn’t help smiling. When his face stilled in sadness, something inside her broke a little. She watched him with her children, the easy way in which he showed Nicky some feature on his computer, the serious manner in which he considered some passing comment of Tanzie’s – the kind of comment that would have caused Marty to roll his eyes to Heaven – and she wished he had been in their lives long ago. When they were alone and he held her close to him, his palm resting with a hint of possession on Jess’s thigh, his breath soft in her ear, she felt with a quiet certainty that it would all be okay. It wasn’t that Ed would make it okay – he had his own problems to deal with – but that somehow the sum of them added up to something better. They would make it okay. He was the first person Jess had ever met with whom she understood the saying: They were just really good together.