I’d tried declining the opportunity but it was clear this wasn’t something I could get out of, and I knew if I pushed much harder I would raise suspicion about my own family dynamics. But I had filed away most parts of my life into neat little boxes and hidden them deep. We were very good at that as a family. I had learned from the best, even if it did go against everything I expected from my clients.

‘So why are you interested in family counselling?’ was the first question I’d been asked in my introductory session.

I told the counsellor how lucky I’d been growing up. That I’d had very loving parents and my upbringing on the island of Evergreen had been idyllic. I said I was interested in familial relationships and always thought I’d had an ability to listen and help. I told her the truth up to a point. The point where we left the island. Or maybe just before that.

My counsellor had been eager to know more about Evergreen, as most people are. ‘And only one hundred people lived there?’ she’d asked me, stunned.

I nodded. ‘Just over. I knew all of them and they all knew me.’

I told her how wonderful it was as she gaped back at me. ‘I honestly loved it,’ I laughed. I knew some people thought it was claustrophobic, but there was nowhere else on earth I had wanted to be.

‘And you didn’t find it too remote?’ Another popular question, because even though the ferry only took thirty minutes, you couldn’t see Evergreen from the Dorset coast.

‘I didn’t,’ I told her. My sister, however, had hated the fact that in the winter months my dad’s ferry only ran once a day. But then my sister had hated all the things that had made me love it.

‘You say you were eleven when you left,’ she went on. ‘How old were your siblings?’

‘I was the baby of the family. Danny was fifteen,’ I told her, ‘and Bonnie was seventeen.’

She nodded, though I didn’t know what she had gleaned from that, and all the time I carried on smiling, careful not to let cracks show. I knew she would soon be prying deeper into the end of our last summer on the island and the years after we’d left. She would want to know what triggered my family to break down, and I wouldn’t be able to tell her. Every one of us had secrets we’d held too close and because we’d never spoken about them, they’d torn us apart in the end.

I wanted to help other families talk because that’s where we went wrong, only I wasn’t going to tell her that. Instead I breezed through what happened after we left, highlighting only the bare facts.