Ronnie turned as the cottage door opened with a blast of cold air. Blair came in, dark eyes questioning. She grimaced, listening as Mack as described his suicidal call to Pax while another man was in her room, and again that morning. ‘She gloated about it, Veronica.’ It didn’t sound at all like Pax, but Mack was reeling off times and soundbites. ‘She freely admitted that she’d picked up a complete stranger and spent the night with him!’ And now he started laying into her character, punching out words. ‘She was living like a slut when I first met her, so I might have guessed she’d revert to type. She’s not been herself for months. Not since you came back on the scene.’

‘Whoa, or this phone’s going down, Mack.’ She looked at Blair, who was holding up his hands and backing out. She held out a hand to stop him. ‘Are you saying that Pax has left you?’

‘At fifteen-eleven on Christmas Day, your daughter said, “This marriage is over”. A week later, she rubs her infidelity in my face. Make of that what you will.’

She was still frantically trying to gather fact from vitriol. She’d never once imagined that Pax – so damning of her mother’s desertion, so determined to make amends by making her own family sacrosanct – would pull the plug on her marriage, let alone involve another man. It was a red rag to a bully like Mack.

‘She’ll never see Kes again!’ he raged. ‘When you see her, tell her I’ve taken legal advice and she is finished as a mother; Kes needs to be protected from you both!’

‘For God’s sake, Mack, let’s be sensible about this.’

‘You’re a fine one to talk!’ came a piercing interjection and Ronnie realised that Pax’s puritanical mother-in-law Mairi was sharing the call on speakerphone. ‘You abandoned your wee family. And that’s just what your silly girl is doing to hers. The sins of the mothers.’

‘This is not about me, Mairi,’ Ronnie snapped. Blair was beside her now, a warm hand on her shoulder.

‘This all started the moment you came back into her life!’ Mairi was still shrilling.

‘Pax is a grown woman.’ She mouthed ‘Where is Pax?’ to Blair. He mimed hands at a car steering wheel, then threw them wide in an aeroplane impersonation, which didn’t exactly help.

Meanwhile, the voice in her ear had dropped an octave to a chilling alto. ‘Oh, you’re not getting out of it that easily, Veronica. Let’s talk straight, mother to mother. She will lose that wee bairn as surely as you lost yours if this ends in divorce. I’ve watched her, and it’s no way to raise a child. D’you know how much she drinks? If you ask me, you need to care for your own daughter a wee bit more and worry about the gee-gees less.’

‘I’m aware she’s been unhappy,’ Ronnie said carefully. She’d seen the light draining from behind her daughter’s eyes, the glass walls around her thickening, but theirs was such a fragile bond there was no possibility of rushing in to help, the sinner in her glass house unable to cast the first stone.