‘How about your dad?’ asked Maggie, doing her best at nonchalance. ‘Did you have to pretend with him too?’

‘He’s all right,’ she replied. ‘He’s a bit . . . well, I like him, but I can see why you got rid of him. He’s kind of flaky and woo-woo sometimes.’

‘Wait – what? I got rid of him? He walked out!’ Maggie spluttered. There was a charged moment of silence bristling with the shock of old presumptions having been challenged, and then they both spoke at once. ‘You didn’t think that—?’

‘I just assumed that—’

‘He left!’ Maggie said. ‘He went off to be a famous photographer. I was devastated!’ They stared at one another before Maggie remembered to stare at the road. ‘I thought you knew!’

‘No! Because you never talked about him!’ Amelia retaliated.

Maggie felt bamboozled, racking her brain to try and figure out how this misunderstanding could have come about. She had been so careful not to blame Will aloud in front of Amelia, or bad-mouth him too disparagingly, that perhaps she hadn’t ever actually spelled out the events themselves. Had she? And so perhaps Amelia, in turn, had taken Maggie’s silent disapproval of Will and interpreted their history as being one where she’d gone off him. As if! Over the years, Amelia must have accepted her own assumption of truth as gospel, with a drum beating louder and faster as the accompanying bitterness took root. Mum sent him away. Mum robbed me of my father.

‘That must have been pretty shit,’ Amelia said eventually.

Pretty shit. You don’t say, Maggie thought, remembering all those desperate lonely nights when she had paced up and down with her wailing infant, feeling simultaneously alone and smothered. ‘It wasn’t shit, because I had you at least, and I loved you enough for two parents,’ she managed to say. ‘But it was hard for a while, yes.’ A stunned few seconds passed. ‘Sorry, we probably should have had this conversation a long time ago, you and I, but I guess I didn’t want you to feel that he’d rejected you,’ she went on. ‘When it was me he was breaking up with.’

Another stretch of silence followed. ‘Anyway,’ she added, switching up into a brighter gear. With the three of them having just forged a tentative new alliance, perhaps this wasn’t the right time to go raking up old hurts. At the end of the day, they had all survived to tell the tale. ‘Are you hungry? Because I am.’

‘I’m starving,’ said Amelia.

‘Good, you can make yourself useful then,’ said Maggie. ‘Find the nearest pizza place on your phone and let’s make a pit stop for lunch. And then I’m going to tell you about the surprise I’ve got planned for this afternoon. This is our holiday after all,’ she declared over the sound of her daughter’s whoop.

Chapter Thirty-One