She stopped, dripping jade paint onto the carpet. ‘What things?’

‘You’ll see.’

We spent the day driving, our soundtrack a playlist on Lily’s iPod that provided one minute a heartbreaking dirge of love and loss, the next an ear-perforating raging anthem of hatred against all mankind. I mastered the art, while on the motorway, of mentally rising above the noise and focusing on the road, while Lily sat beside me, nodding in time to the beat and occasionally performing an impromptu drum roll on the dashboard. It was good, I thought, that she was enjoying herself. And who needed both eardrums to be working, anyway?

We started off in Stortfold, and took in the places Will and I used to sit and eat, the picnic spots in the fields above the town, his favourite benches around the grounds of the castle, and Lily had the grace to try not to look bored. To be fair, it was quite hard to work up enthusiasm about a series of fields. So I sat down and told her how, when I had first met him, Will had barely left the house, and how, through a mixture of subterfuge and bloody-mindedness, I had set about getting him out again. ‘You have to understand,’ I said, ‘that your father hated to be dependent on anyone. And us going out didn’t just mean that he had to rely on someone else but he had to be seen to be relying on someone else.’

‘Even if it was you.’

‘Even if it was me.’

She was thoughtful for a moment. ‘I’d hate people seeing me like that. I don’t even like people seeing me with wet hair.’

We visited the gallery where he had tried to explain to me the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ modern art (I still couldn’t tell), and she pulled a face at almost everything on its walls. We poked our heads into the wine merchant’s where he had made me taste different sorts of wine (‘No, Lily, we are not doing a wine-tasting today’), then walked to the tattoo shop where he had persuaded me to get my tattoo. She asked if I could lend her the money for one (I nearly wept with relief when the man told her no under-eighteens), then asked to see my little bumble bee. That was one of the few occasions when I felt I’d actually impressed her. She laughed out loud when I told her what he had chosen for himself: a Best Before date stencilled on his chest.

‘You have the same awful sense of humour,’ I said, and she tried not to look pleased.

It was then that the owner, overhearing our conversation, mentioned that he had a photograph. ‘I keep pictures of all of my tattoos,’ he said, from under a heavily waxed handlebar moustache. ‘I like to have a record. Just remind me of the date?’

We stood there silently as he flicked through his laminated binder. And there it was, from almost two years previously, a close-up of that black and white design, neatly inked onto Will’s caramel skin. I stood and stared at the photograph, its familiarity taking my breath away. The little black and white patterned block, the one I had washed with a soft cloth, which I had dried, rubbed sun cream into, rested my face against. I would have reached out to touch it, but Lily got there first, her fingers with their bitten nails tracing gently over the image of her father’s skin. ‘I think I’ll get one,’ she said. ‘Like his, I mean. When I’m old enough.’

‘So how is he?’

Lily and I turned. The tattooist was sitting on his chair, rubbing at a heavily coloured forearm. ‘I remember him. We don’t get many quadriplegics in here.’ He grinned. ‘He’s a bit of a character, isn’t he?’

A lump rose suddenly to my throat.

‘He’s dead,’ said Lily, baldly. ‘My dad. He’s dead.’

The tattooist winced. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. I had no idea.’

‘Can I keep this?’ Lily had started to work the photograph of Will’s tattoo out of its plastic binder.

‘Sure,’ he said hurriedly. ‘If you want it, take it. Here, have the plastic cover as well. Case it rains.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, tucking it neatly under her arm, and as the man stuttered another apology, we walked out of the shop.

We had lunch – an all-day breakfast – silently in a café. Feeling the day’s mood leach away from us, I began to talk. I told Lily what I knew of Will’s romantic history, about his career, that he was the kind of man who made you long for his approval, whether just by doing something that impressed him or making him laugh with some stupid joke. I told her how he was when I met him, and how he had changed, softened, starting to find joy in small things, even if many of those small things seemed to involve making fun of me. ‘Like I wasn’t very adventurous when it came to food. My mum basically has ten set meals which she’s rotated for the past twenty-five years. And none of them involves quinoa. Or lemongrass. Or guacamole. Your dad would eat anything.’

‘And now you do too?’

‘Actually, I still try guacamole every couple of months or so. For him, really.’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘It tastes okay, I suppose. I just can’t get past the fact that it looks like something you blow out of your nose.’

I told her about his previous girlfriend, and how we had gatecrashed her wedding dance, me sitting on Will’s lap as we turned his motorized wheelchair in circles on the dance floor, and she had snorted her drink through her nose. ‘Seriously? Her wedding?’ In the overheated confines of the little café, I conjured her father for her as best I could, and perhaps it was because we were away from all the complications of home, or because her parents were in a different country, or because, just for once, someone was telling her stories about him that were uncomplicated and funny, she laughed, and asked questions, nodding often as if my answers had confirmed something she already believed. Yes, yes, he was like this. Yes, maybe I’m like that too.