Pulling herself up, Lou sat on the edge of the bed and clutched the duvet around her neck. Her eyes were sore, as though someone had chucked a handful of Blackpool sand into her face. Her head felt thick. If someone had told her she’d woken from a weekend bender, she would have been hard-pressed to contradict them. On the chair in the corner of the room, next to a pile of clean laundry still waiting to be put away, she saw a carrier bag stuffed with tubes of Christmas wrapping paper. No matter how hard it had been on her part-time wages from the Post Office, and without a single penny in maintenance from their feckless father, Mum had always managed to make Christmas special. It would break her heart to see the house the week before Christmas without a turkey in the freezer, a bottle of Baileys in the fridge or a single string of tinsel wrapped around her ornaments on the mantelshelf. Lou picked at the stitching around one of the duvet cover’s buttonholes. If this was all her fault, didn’t that make it her responsibility to reintroduce a semblance of normality to their lives? Or try, at least. She looked down at herself and frowned. Yesterday’s jeans, a creased work tabard, and the funky smell of a day’s work, hardly said normality. Dragging herself up, she headed for the bathroom.

Standing beneath water a little too hot for comfort for ten minutes had the desired effect and loosened the tangled mess in Lou’s head just enough for her to form a plan. It was her day off, so she’d hit the shops, fill the kitchen cupboards, and have a homemade shepherd’s pie on the table by the time Dean got home from college and Stephen finished work. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. And a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, right?

Making a mental shopping list, and with her hair still wet from the shower, Lou ran downstairs. But as her foot reached the bottom step, the brakes screeched on her plan. Through the open kitchen door and beneath a fug of cigarette smoke, she saw Stephen and Dean sitting at the table, surrounded by the previous evening’s squashed beer cans and kebab wrappers. Lou cowered behind the banisters. Stephen and Dean never spent any time together. Yet, here was Stephen, his Manchester United dressing gown gaping to reveal his midriff, stirring a mound of sugar into a mug and pushing it across the table to Dean.

‘Drink this,’ he said, his voice gruff from a night on the beers.

Dean gazed into the rusty orange builder’s brew, his eyes vacant. He was barely recognisable as the young man who used to start each day by running down the stairs, gym bag slung over his shoulder, snatching a slice of toast, and kissing Mum goodbye on his way out of the front door.