Tara clicked crossly around Toby’s website while she waited for him. His latest feature was about the five best hotels in the Pacific North-West to ‘recolonize your happy place’. All five hotels looked like heaven’s guest room: huge white beds, tranquil treatment rooms with towel flowers, shadowy indoor pools fit for a Roman emperor. Toby had painstakingly crafted two hundred words about each one, and only used the word ‘luxurious’ three times.

What a life, Tara thought. The biggest effort he puts in is finding synonyms for ‘luxurious’, and he doesn’t even manage that all the way through.

Toby’s call was taking a long time. Tara carried on clicking through to the hotels, then to the areas themselves. Seafood shacks, turreted Victorian mansions hidden amongst lush fairytale forests, friendly neighbourhood coffee shops with house-roasted beans and buttery pastries, snowy resort hotels with hot chocolate and sled dogs. Peaceful places where you could sink into the quietness and be whoever you felt like being that day.

Her eye skimmed the copy; it wasn’t Toby’s feature, but another journalist, a woman about her own age who’d gone to the mountain-top lodge for a month’s therapy after a drawn-out divorce. (I left like a snake who’d shrugged off a skin that didn’t fit any more, and emerged into the light with fresh new scales, a gorgeous new pattern. I even moved in a different way. I was ready to start again.)

Tara let the idea unfold in her mind, picturing herself standing on the mountain top in the unbroken snow, a stranger to everyone she met, undefined by her job, or her mother, or her clients. Who was stopping her running away to reinvent herself? If she sold the house, she could afford to do her Interrailing but in style this time. No fear of running out of money in Prague, or sleeping on crispy hostel sheets. Ironically, Ruth would be giving Tara the trip she’d denied her twelve years ago, but a million times more luxuriously.

Her WhatsApp was ringing; Toby had finished his call.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘So what’s the problem?’

Had she said there was a problem? Or was he just anticipating them, now Dad was around?

‘Just … Dad.’ She groaned, thinking back to her irritating evening. ‘He’s presuming so much. Like, I’ve just had supper with him and his daughter—’

‘Our half-sister,’ he corrected her. ‘Molly.’

She took a big gulp of wine. ‘I keep forgetting this isn’t quite as new to you as it is to me.’

‘Don’t be like that, Tara,’ he said reproachfully. ‘It’s not you.’

‘What’s not me?’ She eyed the bottle, then topped up her glass.

‘Sarcasm. That’s my thing. Stay in your lane!’

‘Maybe I want a go in your lane.’