‘Lily, I think we should go. Mrs Traynor, I’m going to write down my number. We’ll come back when this news has had a chance to sink in.’

‘Says who? I’m not coming back here. She thinks I’m a liar. Jesus. This family.’

Lily stared at us both in disbelief, then pushed her way out of the little room, knocking over a small walnut occasional table as she went. I stooped, picking it up, and carefully replaced the little silver boxes that had been laid out neatly on its surface.

Mrs Traynor was gaunt with shock.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Traynor,’ I said. ‘I really did try to speak to you before we came.’

I heard the car door slam.

Mrs Traynor took a breath. ‘I don’t read things if I don’t know where they’ve come from. I had letters. Vile letters. Telling me that I … I don’t answer anything much now … It’s never anything I want to hear.’ She looked bewildered and old and fragile.

‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’ I picked up my bag and fled.

‘Don’t say anything,’ said Lily, as I got into the car. ‘Just don’t. Okay?’

‘Why did you do that?’ I sat in the driver’s seat, keys in my hand. ‘Why would you sabotage it all?’

‘I could see how she felt about me from the moment she looked at me.’

‘She’s a mother, plainly still grieving her son. We had just given her an enormous shock. And you went off at her like a rocket. Could you not have been quiet and let her digest it all? Why do you have to push everyone away?’

‘Oh, what the hell would you know about me?’

‘You seem determined to wreck your relationship with every person who might get close to you.’

‘Oh, God, is this about the stupid tights again? What do you know about anything? You spend your whole life alone in a crappy flat where nobody visits. Your parents plainly think you’re a loser. You don’t have the guts to walk out of even the world’s most pathetic job.’

‘You have no idea how hard it is to get any job, these days, so don’t you tell me –’

‘You’re a loser. Worse than that you’re a loser who thinks you can tell other people what to do. And who gives you the right? You sat there at my dad’s bedside and you watched him die and you did nothing about it. Nothing! So I hardly think you’re any great judge of how to behave.’

The silence in the car was as hard and brittle as glass. I stared at the wheel. I waited until I was sure I could breathe normally.

Then I started the car and we drove the 120 miles home in silence.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I barely saw Lily for the next few days, and that suited me fine. When I came home from work a trail of crumbs or empty mugs confirmed that she had been there. A couple of times I walked in and the air felt oddly disturbed, as if something had taken place I couldn’t quite identify. But nothing was missing and nothing obviously altered, and I put it down to the weirdness of sharing a flat with someone you weren’t getting on with. For the first time I allowed myself to admit that I missed being on my own.

I called my sister, and she had the good grace not to say, ‘I told you so.’ Well, maybe just once.

‘That is the worst thing about being a parent,’ she said, as if I were one too. ‘You’re meant to be this serene, all-knowing, gracious person who can handle every situation. And sometimes when Thom is rude, or I’m tired, I just want to slam the door at him or stick my tongue out and tell him he’s an arse.’

Which was pretty much how I felt.

Work had reached a misery point where I had to make myself sing show tunes in my car even to make myself drive to the airport.

And then there was Sam.

Who I didn’t think about.

I didn’t think about him in the morning, when I caught sight of my naked body in the bathroom mirror. I didn’t remember the way his fingers had traced my skin and made my vivid red scars not so much invisible as part of a shared history – or how, for one brief evening, I had felt reckless and alive again. I didn’t think about him when I watched the couples, heads bowed together as they examined their boarding passes, off to share romantic adventures – or just hot monkey sex – in destinations far from there. I didn’t think about him on the way to and from work, whenever an ambulance went screaming past. Which seemed to happen an inordinate number of times. And I definitely didn’t think about him in the evening when I sat home alone on my sofa, gazing at a television show whose plot I couldn’t have told you, and looking, I suspected, like the loneliest flammable porno pixie on the planet.

Nathan rang and left a message, asking me to call. I wasn’t sure I could bear to hear the latest episode of his exciting new life in New York, and put it on my mental to-do list of things that would never actually get done. Tanya texted me to say the Houghton-Millers had come home three days early, something to do with Francis’s work. Richard rang, telling me I was on the late shift from Monday to Friday. And please don’t be late, Louisa. I’d like to remind you again that you are on your final warning.

I did the only thing I could think of: I went home, driving to Stortfold with the music turned up loud so that I didn’t have to be alone with my thoughts. I felt grateful for my parents. I felt an almost umbilical pull towards home, the comfort offered by a traditional family and Sunday lunch on the table.