Maggie pressed her lips together, trying not to show how much she disliked her daughter’s smart-alec remarks. This is just normal teenage behaviour, she told herself. This is just boundary-testing and button-pushing. All the same, she was surprised how much it hurt each time. How their tight little partnership of two seemed to be encountering unprecedented stress-points. ‘Here’s hoping,’ she said, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘Although there’s something to be said for sleeping under the stars. Remember that time we stayed on the dig in France, and it was so hot that everyone slept in hammocks outside?’

‘Yeah, and there were loads of gross bugs and weird noises – it was horrible,’ Amelia said, seeming to disregard the fact that, going home from this particular trip, she had told Maggie, shiny-eyed, that it had been her best holiday ever.

Maggie decided not to remind her of that now. Amelia was apparently so set on forging this cool new image for herself that she would rather rewrite any parts of her history that might be viewed by others as dorky or strange. And so archaeology was now ‘really boring’. Historical ruins were ‘totally lame’. Geological investigations were for weirdos. Instead, thanks to the influence of wretched Tara Webster and the rest of her gang, Amelia was now mostly interested in applying flicky eyeliner and clumpy mascara, the latest banal YouTuber and obsessed with social media.

But Maggie was not thinking about Tara Webster, she reminded herself. ‘Let’s get going anyway, before the Friday traffic becomes too heinous,’ she said instead. ‘Ready?’

‘Suppose so,’ grunted Amelia with all the reluctance of someone facing several hours of root-canal work at the dentist. She forced herself off the sofa and upright, a weary If I have to expression on her face.

‘Great,’ said Maggie, feeling her voice becoming tighter with each word, in her desperation to remain cheerful. ‘In that case, the holiday starts here!’

Amelia had been a sickly little thing as a baby: sallow and small, suffering terribly from eczema until she was five, when Maggie had finally discovered the precise combination of washing-powder brand, medication and non-dairy products that seemed to help. Those early years now felt like a blur of despair and exhaustion: all the dreadful nights they’d shared weeping together, Amelia’s sheets covered in specks of blood where she’d been unable to stop scratching, however much emollient cream Maggie slathered on her, however many scratch-mitts and soothing baths they tried. It had bonded them, though, such horror, forging a deep primal alliance between the two of them, partners in combat. When Will had walked out seven months after Amelia’s birth, claiming he couldn’t cope, the bond between mother and daughter only strengthened.