‘How much do you need?’

‘Maybe fifty.’ She chewed her lip. She picked up a handful from the bag, held it as if weighing it. ‘Grand,’ she added, as if it were possible I’d have thought she’d be visiting me in the middle of the night for fifty dollars.

‘Michael knows I have it.’

‘He knows he left it with you, not that you have it.’ She’d practised this, had her arguments loaded into the chamber just like my excuses. ‘You could tell him the police took it. You could tell him you donated it. You could tell him you burned it.’

I could pretend I hadn’t thought through all of these options myself, but I won’t. I’m reliable, remember?

‘What kind of trouble are you in?’ I asked. What I didn’t say was that there were richer, more-legal people for her to ask. Her father, for one. And fifty grand was a lot of money, sure, but she was a surgeon who owned property: if she wanted fifty thousand dollars (she’d said ‘maybe fifty’, which to me meant she needed exactly fifty), that was what she needed to patch the gap between what she could obtain on her own and the total. And she wanted cash. Which meant fast, quiet and off the books. She was in a much bigger hole than she was letting on.

‘I don’t need help. I just need money.’

‘It’s not my money.’

‘It’s not his either.’

‘Can we talk about this tomorrow?’

She put the money down, but I could see her rifling through her mental notes to make sure she’d said everything she’d come here to say, as if she were sitting in a job interview and the interviewers had asked the dreaded ‘So, do you have any questions for us?’ She must have decided she’d ticked off all her most convincing points, because she walked to the door and opened it. A swirl of freezing air shot through.

‘Just look at how they’ve treated you. And you still think you owe them? One day you’ll realise family isn’t about whose blood runs in your veins, it’s who you’d spill it for.’

She put her hands in her pockets and trudged into the night.

I went back inside and looked at the money in a kind of stupor, trying to analyse everything that had just happened.

I wondered if Sofia was right. That even though my family had made a deliberate effort to shut me out, I still felt obligated to them. Was that why I was here? It was too big a question after too many beers too close to midnight, so I gave up on self-examination. I picked up the phone and called back Room Two.

‘Hello?’ To my surprise, Sofia’s voice came down the line. ‘Ern?’