Yan eventually turns into a large, shitty housing estate and immediately my hackles go up.

‘Is this where you live?’ I ask her.

‘Yeah.’ Her voice is quiet.

‘Is it a council estate?’

‘Some of it, but quite a bit of it is privately owned now. Our landlord’s a rental agency.’

I inwardly grimace as we drive by a wall of graffiti. That might be, but nothing about this estate screams secure environment for a child and her single mother.

‘Did you ever think about living with your parents?’ I ask in a neutral tone, my thumb stroking her knuckles.

‘Not really. It would have been the practical option, but they need their space and so do I. I’m twenty-seven. I chose to bring up my daughter on my own, so at some point I was just better off standing on my own two feet and getting on with it, you know?’

‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘I get that.’ My circumstances couldn’t be more different from hers, and I’m a decade older, but being overly reliant on our parents in adulthood is seriously rough. There comes a time when we need to spread our wings and forge our own path.

‘It’s just round to the left,’ Marlowe tells Yan. ‘Second block on the left. It’s a bit of a shithole, I’m afraid,’ she adds, turning to me.

I hate that she’s embarrassed about where she lives almost as much as I hate that she lives here. I hate that she’s so much better than me as a person and yet life has dealt me a far better hand.

It’s not fucking fair.

Yan pulls to a halt outside a grim-looking block of flats with a grey pebble-dashed exterior. My professional guess is that these blocks were built in the seventies and should have been pulled down instead of being sold on privately. They’re not as bad as some of the worst estates in the Docklands, but they’re not the best, either.

‘Thanks so much for this evening,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’

‘You can thank me inside,’ I say firmly, releasing her hand so I can unfasten my seatbelt.

‘No, that’s not—you don’t have to⁠—’

‘Nice try, sweetheart, but I’m walking you to the door. Come on. Out you get.’

She obeys reluctantly, and we start towards her block of flats. The air outside is thick with the smell of weed. It’s noisy—TVs blaring, music thumping, voices raised in anger. It’s the soundtrack of people who don’t give a fuck about anyone else. Case in point: the fly-tipping. Right by the front door someone’s left an old, stained mattress, a rusty pram and fuck loads of old baby clothes. For fuck’s sake.

‘It’s very different from your place,’ Marlowe says apologetically as we walk up the path.