Toby didn’t wait for her to speak. ‘I bumped into Dad at a hotel launch in Dubai about eighteen months ago. He’d designed one of the suites, but I hadn’t noticed – my fault for not reading the press release. I saw him in the lobby, doing an interview and …’ He paused. ‘It seemed ridiculous to ignore him, when I was supposed to be interviewing him anyway, so we had a drink and just … talked. I realized he wasn’t some ogre. He was just a man I knew of, but didn’t really know. Like a distant uncle. He was OK.’

Tara tried to process the words. It was such a huge fact to have existed between them, invisible for so long. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It was before Mum died. I knew what you’d say.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, Tara,’ said Toby, infuriatingly patient. ‘I knew you’d go spare. You’ve never been able to hear a bad word about Mum – and fair enough, she needed someone to have her back – but you have to admit that it made you pretty unreceptive to different viewpoints.’

‘No, it—’

‘Look, I’m not judging you. Mum needed her version of what a bastard Dad was to be true so that everything else in her life made sense, so …’ Tara could hear the shrug down the phone. ‘It is what it is. She lived the life she wanted to live.’

‘She lived the life she was left with,’ Tara snapped back.

‘There you go. You see what I mean?’

In her dark bedroom, her old childhood bedroom transformed in every possible way since she’d left home, Tara stared out of the window towards the studio. The lights were all off – or was there one light still on, somewhere downstairs? Was Dad still up? Or had he left it on for Molly, in case she needed to find the bathroom in an unfamiliar house?

‘But I thought things were OK with you and Dad?’ Toby went on, more gently. ‘I got a message from you the other night, saying you’d both found a great new Japanese delivery place.’

‘So you read my texts then? You just can’t be bothered to reply?’

‘Oh, Tara …’

Her mind was zig-zagging. ‘So, is that what all this was for? Buttering me up so he could bring Molly here?’

Toby didn’t bother to hide his incredulity. ‘Why would Dad deliberately arrange to look after a ten-year-old kid in the middle of a big work project? Maybe – just maybe! – it really is a massive fuck-up and he’s trying to do the right thing.’

‘Maybe he expects me to look after her.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, he barely knows you. You might be an absolutely crap babysitter.’

He said it in such a deadpan, Toby-ish way that Tara was pushed off of her self-righteous track. ‘Shut up.’