‘I’m not going forever,’ I assured myself as much as him. I thought about the last time I was at Heathrow, sad about Bel but expectant about Seb, waiting in the car park with a growing sense of excitement. Seb, who’d based most of his love-making on film quotes he’d stolen; who’d named himself after John Malkovich’s ruthless lover from Dangerous Liaisons, I’d finally realised on Christmas night. With a shiver I remembered the ‘lick every inch of you’ line – it had turned out to be from The Long Good Friday. I suppose Seb had warned me he was a film buff.

Stamping my feet against the cold and the memories, waiting for my dad to open the boot and immersed in banishing Seb’s ghost, I missed the florist’s van pulling off a few cars in front.

‘I’ll be back in a month or two for the trial.’ I hugged my bereft father tight. ‘As soon as the date comes through.’

‘You take care out there, Maggie.’ He kissed my forehead. ‘Be sensible, all right?’

‘Dad, I’m thirty, not thirteen.’

‘You’ll always be thirteen to me, lovie.’

I refused to cry; I’d never stop. I kissed his cheek; he smelled like my childhood and I savoured it for the last time in a while. ‘I love you, Dad,’ I muttered. ‘And you’ll let me know about Gar, won’t you?’

‘Of course I will. Here, let me.’ He swung the suitcase onto the trolley. ‘Try not to worry about her. She’s at peace at last, I think.’

The New Year had dawned truly freezing, a throwback to the winters of my childhood. I hated January with a vengeance; it spoke of bare cold earth and no hope, the festivities over and no colour in the sky. The wind whisking round the eaves whispered of my mother’s depression, always at its worst during this bleak point of the year.

I had enrolled on a music therapy course – I’d truly finished with TV – and then Gar had slipped into a coma, and they couldn’t say how long she might have left. I held her soft, frail hand and watched her sleeping; imagined her dreaming of my twinkly-eyed grandfather, of my mother and her brother Harry running on the Cornish beaches as children, kite-flying at Daymer Bay, scrabbling down to mussel-gather at Epphaven. Of Pendarlin at dusk, the smoke from the chimney curling up to the sky like a child’s painting. Of baking fruitcake and whipping up lemon meringue pie for Sunday lunch, and letting me scrape the bowl clean.

I kissed Gar’s soft face and I cried and cried. I said goodbye forever, for she was gone now, and then I booked my ticket to Australia.