Some interrupted night in the future, Cedar will get me to sing ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ to him for the last time. And I won’t know it’s the last until long after, until I’ve forgotten that specific time. I won’t know that he’s decided dreams are just dreams, and songs are no longer required.

At eight, Cedar is already not seven, already not six. Every moment you have with a child rushes away to the past.

‘So, Simon has been busy upstairs,’ Faye tells us. Her hands are clasped together in front of her. Her face has a serious look on it. She is standing at the foot of the stairs, having just come down from a higher floor.

The dishwasher is halfway through its cycle. The baking trays and cake tin are on the dish rack. Lacy and I are sitting at the dining table with glasses of mineral water. We finished the kitchen jobs and found ourselves in a silent house, both Simon and Faye elsewhere.

‘Okay, have to get you ready for something,’ Faye says. ‘A thing you need to know. Better to show you than tell you.’ She pauses, as if she might have got it wrong, and a way of telling us might occur to her after all. She glances up the stairs, and nods. ‘You know Simon, your brother Simon. Well, I don’t think you know Simone yet.’

A woman appears on the stairs, her feet first, in red sandals, then the hem of a white robe, trimmed with gold lace. She has a red ribbon around her waist. Her left hand is on the balustrade for balance. The skin of her arm is an even cream colour, no flaws, no blemishes, like a mannequin, a doll. Her left shoulder is bare. She has wild auburn hair, with a red ribbon and vine leaves in it. Her face is just beginning to smile, and stays that way, a smile beginning. She moves as if she is hovering, not quite real. As if she has been invented to be observed, or has come from another time.

Lacy says, ‘Oh.’

‘It’s me,’ the woman on the stairs says, in a voice that is almost Simon’s, Simon’s but muffled. She looks at me, wide-eyed, her entire blue-grey irises showing. ‘I’m Simone now.’

Faye is her normal self, still – her regular self, as Simone moves to stand near her, on the second-bottom step. She takes Simone’s right hand. Faye has blemishes on her arms, fine wrinkles on her face. She has aged, as we all do. She is watching me, checking me. Simon’s voice is gone, as if it wasn’t there, an act of ventriloquism I’ve imagined, a sound that only happened in my head.

‘I told you in an email I was having to face up to some things,’ his voice says.