But after that, nearly nothing. Contact had faded into sporadic birthday and Christmas cards, and she’d been too proud, and too conscious of Ruth’s still touchy reaction to Dad’s name, to chase him. Occasionally, out of late-night curiosity, she’d search online to see what his architecture practice had built most recently. The tortoiseshell frames mutated into expensive rimless glasses, and slowly the flesh-and-blood man vanished behind press releases about hotels and urban developments. Eventually, Tara realized she didn’t actually want to know what sort of life her dad had created without her and Toby, and she stopped looking.

One strange phone call summed up everything Tara felt about her dad. Several years ago – after graduation, before Justin – Tara was on the train home from a weekend in Cornwall with a new boyfriend: their first weekend away which, she realized belatedly, contained every red flag that he wasn’t the Ideal Man she was trying to convince herself he was. She’d answered the withheld number, mainly because Hugh had been explaining cricket’s Duckworth–Lewis method for over twenty minutes, and when she’d heard her dad say, Hello, Taransay, the world had abruptly narrowed around her ear and his voice, as if they’d gone into a tunnel. He was ‘in Cyprus’ and didn’t seem to have phoned her for any reason in particular. He sounded a bit tipsy, but jolly, and then tearful. He’d said something about the sea, and asked her how she was doing without listening to her answer, and then they’d gone into a real tunnel and lost reception. No way to call back. She’d unpicked the conversation over and over afterwards – was the sea a metaphor? When he said he was well, did he really mean he had terminal cancer? – until it fell to pieces in her hands. Later, it had occurred to Tara that maybe her name was next to someone else’s in his contacts and he’d phoned her by accident, then decided to chat anyway.

Tara stared at the Hunters in the photograph as if it might contain clues as to why this little unit would only last a few more years. What did her dad look like now? Where did he live? Who did he love? What did he sound like? Who had he turned into – and would she, one day, see those changes creep over herself?