Tara didn’t want to say, You’re lying, because it was such an ugly thing to say across this beautiful white table, with its delicate water glasses and silver cutlery. She let the silence speak for her.

Mum wouldn’t have kept presents from them. That absolutely wasn’t her style. She didn’t exactly encourage them to see their dad, but she definitely wouldn’t have stopped them, if he’d tried.

‘Your mother was understandably protective of you and Toby.’ He fiddled with his glass. ‘I wasn’t a great husband. She had her reasons for wanting to protect you two. With the benefit of hindsight there are … things I could have done differently.’

‘Don’t turn this on to Mum.’ One step forward, two steps back. ‘If you’re suggesting there’s a cupboard full of your presents in the house, I can assure you there isn’t. And I left home fifteen years ago – I’m not exactly hard to track down.’

Keith sighed. ‘As I say, there are things I could have done differently.’

Tara looked at him. He was being very honest, but there were careful gaps. Not just the things she didn’t want to talk about, but other secrets she sensed he was skating over. Did she want to know what?

She really wasn’t sure.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘… and then Rhys.’ Sian Bannon blew out her cheeks with a despairing sigh. ‘Jesus. Rhys.’

‘Rhys isn’t coping well in the temporary accommodation?’

Sian fixed Tara with a dead-eyed look. ‘He set fire to his bedroom curtains while we were asleep.’

Under the desk, Tara circled her wrist, which was aching from taking increasingly disturbing notes about the Bannon family and the issues arising from their third move in four weeks. Dylan, the youngest, had got them ejected from Sian’s sister’s place, after he smeared the bathroom, landing and two bedrooms with, well, something awful (‘He was only showing his cousins what the house looked like when we went back …’); Mared had traumatized her grandma’s cat by trying to ‘teach it to swim’ in the bath. And now Rhys had set fire to the curtains in the emergency accommodation the council had found for them.

Tara was doing her best to help Sian. She’d already given out-of-hours support in dealing with insurance and coping with recurrent nightmares, but the junior Bannons needed emergency intervention from child psychiatry experts for what sounded like PTSD. And maybe a fire prevention officer.

She wrote David? on her notes. He’d responded to her kitchen noticeboard plea for volunteers to donate a few hours’ counselling, and from what he’d said about his clinical work, he was more equipped than she was to deal with Rhys and his lighter. Maybe between the two of them they could stop the Bannons burning down their next property.