‘She was very successful. More work than she could take on.’

Keith nodded. ‘It’s held up well, hasn’t it? Hard to remember what a poky little place this was when your mother and I first bought it.’

Tara couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Have you just come here to congratulate yourself on your own DIY?’

‘No. Of course not.’ The middle-aged stranger posing in exactly the same way her father had, elbow on the breakfast bar, gazed at her as if he were taking in every tiny detail of her face. ‘I was in the area for work, so I thought I’d pop by and see how you were.’

Tara stared back at him.

‘What do you mean, how am I? In general, in myself? My health? Professionally? Or how am I coping with my mother dropping dead of a heart condition I didn’t even know she had? What do you mean, how I am?’ Her voice had risen, despite her efforts to keep it level.

Keith didn’t react to her anger. Infuriatingly, he was as calm as Tara wished she could be. ‘All of the above. Where do you want to start?’ He smiled apologetically, and the crinkling of his eyes stirred up memories inside Tara’s heart, fluttering like eager moths against a darkened window: the bedtime stories, the birthday cakes, sitting on Dad’s knee in his parked car, pretending to drive it. Memories from Before, when being happy with Dad was allowed.

At no point since Tara had moved into Wye Villa had the ghosts of her own past stepped out of the shadows so vividly as now. She’d forgotten about the dog shower (Mum yelling in horror as she and Toby lathered Branston in her Molton Brown shampoo). She’d forgotten about the passwords (Dad laughing, carrying her, upside down, across the garden for sweet tea). And after the years and years and years of listening to her mother retelling tales so eloquently, often hilariously, about a total shit whose genes were, after all, Tara’s own responsibility to overcome, she’d forgotten her dad’s voice, his smile, his laugh.

Tara stared furiously at her father, who was still smiling at her as if they’d bumped into each other in a restaurant. This man. The cause of so much pain and yet still the man she’d yearned to come back for her. He was here, and she didn’t know what to say.

She dug her nails into her palms and tried to summon up the calm voice she used at work with difficult clients. ‘Normally, when it’s been this long since two people have seen each other, there’s a phone call first. They don’t just crash in on each other because they’re in the area for work.’