Tara made some discreet notes – Harrison, six, guinea pigs, Swan Terrace – giving Grace time to gather herself. Everyone she’d counselled in the last three weeks had tried to go back for something: wedding photos, a handbag, phone chargers. Baby books, family jewellery. Quite a few urns. Tara wondered what she’d save, if her house – well, her mother’s house, now hers – had been half a mile closer to the town centre, within reach of the creeping water.

Her mum’s ashes would probably have been safe enough, on the top shelf in the pantry. Nine months on, Tara and her twin brother Toby were no closer to confirming a place and a time to scatter Ruth Hunter’s remains. If the River Martle had intervened and swept Ruth into the Severn, then back out into the Bristol Channel and on to the Atlantic, it would actually have been a solution to the problem. Also usefully equidistant between her in Longhampton and Toby in America.

Other than that … Tara decided she’d probably have grabbed her handbag. It was a good one, Mulberry, an unusually generous but sensible thirtieth-birthday present from her ex, Justin. For most people, she mused, since Grace was still blowing her nose, a family home contained a paralysing dilemma-load of stuff to rescue from floodwater. But she wouldn’t have had that problem. There was nothing irreplaceable in Wye Villa. Ruth had saved her (and Toby, not that he’d involved himself too deeply) that bother by ditching most of their childhood memories with an efficiency that even Marie Kondo would find somewhat ruthless.

The family photo album, Tara thought, with a pang. She’d have grabbed that – if she could only find it in the house. It contained precious evidence of the Happy Years, pre-divorce, photographs of summers in France with Mum and Dad; her and Toby’s awkward boy–girl twin birthdays, cakes split between dinosaurs and ponies; 5 p.m. Christmas-dinner tables messy with wine glasses and discarded Quality Street wrappers, long-suffering family dog Branston in a variety of paper hats. Tara had searched without success for the album. Surely Mum hadn’t chucked it out? Maybe she had, along with every trace of Dad.

Well, every trace of Dad apart from her and Toby. And Toby had removed himself thoroughly as soon as he’d left school. Tara still missed Toby, even though he’d been living away for nearly fifteen years. Like the album, he was the only surviving evidence of their childhood.

‘Sorry.’ Grace sniffed. ‘I know it’s only stuff. Apart from Fluff and Peppa.’

‘Did the firemen …?’ Tara left a discreet pause.

She nodded. ‘Nice policewoman waded in and got them out. She got an earful from her boss but she could see Harrison was in a right state. I was too, to be honest.’

‘And they’re OK? The guinea pigs?’