She lets out a sound like a small rodent expiring. I guess it didn’t mean anything much to you. It meant a lot to me. It really stuck. You didn’t want to know how I felt so I kept it to myself. But I let it out in other ways. And yes, after you and Jules bought the house in Streatham, I stuck chewing gum on the underside of your dining-room table.

Why?

Revenge.

Revenge?

She turns to him.

Do you know what, Dad, if you’re just going to play Dr Psychoparrot I’m getting out and walking.

No, he says, no. Don’t do that.

He restarts the car.

I’m just surprised. Revenge seems a little strong.

Flora says nothing. In his peripheral vision, he can see her jaw jutting out, her lips tight with the pressure of the unsaid.

Not Flora, he thinks, not Flora too. It’s bad enough with Tom.

Flora, where has this come from?

For a while she lets the windscreen wipers answer him. Finally she says, It was always there. The gum should tell you that.

They are turning into her mother’s road.

But you didn’t tell me. So why now?

There is a small fist of fear in his stomach, tight and cold. It is connected to a memory. He remembers the mouse in his father’s bedsit: a trap-savvy bin-raider known only by his nibblings. They never caught a glimpse of him. Then his father went away for work and Logan stayed with Aunt Pam for a couple of weeks. When they returned, the mouse was curled up in the fluffy hearth rug, stone dead.

It doesn’t matter, she says.

Of course it matters.

In less than a month he will understand, thanks to the post-mortem’s revelation of a small clump of cells that changed his daughter’s perspective.

Will understand, but will have no way of making amends. For now, he can only drive more thoughtfully, pulling up alongside the kerb with all four wheels on the road. He sees the rocks now, compacted into the mud by his tyres. Though still falling, the rain has lessened enough that Rachel’s house is no longer a fuzzy unreality.

Flora says, I never used to see Mum’s point of view. I was a real Daddy’s girl. I thought she’d driven you away with her craziness. But now I think you were the source of it.

He silences the engine’s grumbling.

She wasn’t very stable when I met her, Flora.

Well, I think you destabilized her more.

He is about to defend himself when she continues, We talk now, you know. She said you never meant to stay with her.

That’s true, but—

So why did you get her pregnant?

The Pinot greases his defence: the long-gestated fact slides out all at once.

I didn’t get her pregnant on purpose.

No?