Robin followed her back to the kitchen. She’d always loved this room, the sheer scale of it; you could fit the footprint of her parents’ whole house in here. It was a room you could breathe in: wide and high-ceilinged, with a view all the way down the garden. When they were teenagers and Josh’s mother, Hilary, had still been alive, a pair of double doors had led out to a crazy-paved patio almost hidden by the rampant greenery from a horde of mismatched pots. When she’d died and Kath and Gareth had moved in, they’d completely redone the kitchen, replacing the back wall with bi-fold doors and taming the garden. That had been after Josh and Corinna’s wedding; Hilly had been there for that. She’d been especially kind that day, telling her how lovely Lennie was in her tiny flower-girl dress, how much she admired Robin for working and bringing her up alone. As if she’d been able to see the demolition job going on inside her.

Kath stood with her back against the island unit, arms tightly folded. On Josh, the high cheekbones and long straight nose were combined with their father’s round face so that at certain angles – especially if he hadn’t been running for a while – he looked like an anthropomorphized moon in a Victorian children’s book. Kath’s face was narrower, more like their mother’s, and the cheekbones gave her a warrior look. As Robin had confessed to Corinna a few years earlier, she found her slightly intimidating.

‘Really?’ Rin’d been fond of her; they went shopping together, out for dinner.

‘Well, not really, but she’s not one of those teachers who leaves their authority at school, is she?’

‘Rich, coming from you.’

But Kath commanded respect, always had. Even at eighteen, she’d been self-contained and certain of how she was going to negotiate the world. She’d inherited this lovely house just off Cannon Hill Park but in everything else, she was naturally abstemious and self-disciplined. These days, she biked the boys to their school, Rin said, then carried on to her own, where she taught upper-school maths. She took modern classics on holiday – ‘There’s me with my Gone Girl, and Kath’s ploughing through Umberto Eco’ – and the boys, Al ’n’ Ed, could apparently take or leave screen time. She made Robin feel frivolous.

She was staring at her over the cheekbones now: Come on then, let’s hear it. As if Robin were a kid caught smoking on the school bus. With a flash of something like déjà vu, though, Robin was reminded of Valerie, the way she’d stood in front of her and Maggie like a rabbit in the headlights, and it dawned on her: Kath wasn’t being aggressive; this was defence.