Absorbing the shock, she was again reminded that so much of Pax’s life was totally lost to her. After the terrible, regrettable mess she’d left behind between Pax and Bay, mother and daughter had barely spoken for years, so many olive branches rejected that she had her own grove.

Piecing together a partial picture of her children’s progress from rare, formal correspondence with her mother Ann, Ronnie had worked out that running away to London had propelled her youngest daughter into a druggy trust-fund set who partied through winter and rattled between festivals in summer. Pax’s grandparents – along with Tim, whose London flat often doubled as her refuge – had spent years bailing her out of trouble and calling in favours to set her up with jobs and internships through friends of friends, none of which she held down for more than a week, rejecting stuffy art galleries, estate agencies, banking, insurance, until eventually she’d temped in a big heritage architect’s office and met Mack Forsyth.

A father of two, almost twenty years Pax’s senior, Mack had still been living with his first wife at the time as far as she could work out, which should by rights have horrified Pax’s stuffily strait-laced, forsaking-all-others grandparents. Nevertheless, when Pax’s age-gap relationship very quickly became serious enough for divorce papers to be served and a sapphire ring shown off, the Percys hailed Mack as a Very Good Thing. He’d totally transformed his new fiancée, Ann had reported in a letter to Ronnie, breaking the news before the formal announcement appeared in the Telegraph. The dreadlocks and friendship bracelets had gone, chignons and pearls in their place, and an engagement party was hosted at the stud, a small ceremony in Ayrshire following just weeks later, the first Percy daughter not to marry in St Mary’s church for three centuries. Her rebel daughter.

Had there been a bump? Ronnie wondered now.

Not invited to either celebration, she’d sent good wishes and an over-expensive gift, receiving a polite thank-you letter from Pax in return. That had been their last contact for years. Pax the peacekeeper, who had once forgiven her so much, had become a total stranger after marrying. She hadn’t even had an address for her.

The thought that she might have struggled through the loss of a baby made her ache with remorse for not trying harder. Instead, Ronnie had decamped to Holland, determined to pull herself together after a run of bad, black-dog years. Living in exile with wild and wonderful Henk, her ageing parents increasingly insular and anti-social, she’d become detached, keeping the tiny, outdated photographs of her children folded in the back of her diary because they hurt too much to look at.

Their rapprochement had only started when Ann died, and even then it had been a tiptoe dance of grandmother’s footsteps until this crisis had thrown them all together: emails, stilted calls, a few meetings with Kes, awkward lunches when Tim was in the country. There were still so many secrets between them, and so much hurt and distrust from Pax. A family tree through which secrets grew like ivy.