‘Oh, dear. It’s always been like that – Yarrold flooded one Christmas when you and Toby were tiny. Well, everywhere flooded – it caught us all on the hop. Your mother was coming back from something with you two when they closed the roads and she was stuck down a lane. We had to get you home on a tractor.’ He smiled over the edge of his mug, something of the old twinkle in his eyes. ‘Luckily I was working on a site that had a big digger, so we rescued you on that.’

‘I don’t have any memory of it.’

‘Well, you were just tiny, you and Toby in your froggie wellies.’

‘I don’t even remember the floods.’ Had it been a traumatic forgetting? Or was she just too young? Toby had never mentioned it. Mum had never mentioned it. But then if it involved Dad riding to the rescue in some capacity, it probably wouldn’t have gone into the anecdote rotation. Tara had plenty of childhood memories – Dad drunkenly bidding two months’ wages on a child-size JCB in a charity auction, Dad driving to Bristol to get them McDonald’s when Toby broke his ankle – but as she got older, she realized they were all seen through the Mum prism. Sharp and funny, yet delivered with a weariness that made you feel a bit guilty for smiling.

Her throat dried, and she had a weird sensation of Ruth standing behind her in the kitchen, arms crossed. What would her memory of this story be? Even thinking about Ruth’s face – and the smile she’d be wearing, the too-bright one that hid her real feelings – sent a cold gust of loss across Tara’s heart.

I can’t call Mum to check this out, she thought. I can’t ask her about my first words or her first love – there are moments of my own life that have vanished now she’s not here to tell me about them. I can never ask her how she felt, what she remembers; we’ll never have that adult relationship I assumed would just … evolve.

Tara straightened her shoulders, falling back on the rote things she’d tell a client to say.

‘This is very unfair.’ She looked her father – this man – square in the eye. ‘I don’t know what you want, a reconciliation, or closure, but this … it’s not the way to go about it.’

‘Is that your professional advice? Or are you telling me that as my daughter?’

‘Both.’ Tara didn’t do much work with estranged families but she knew the basics – long preambles, short meetings in neutral spaces. Not ambushes in the family home. ‘You should have phoned first.’

He sighed, then said with a heartbreaking honesty, ‘I thought if I phoned, you wouldn’t see me.’