‘So you want to find a killer, do you? Because it’s easier to conjure up someone with a knife or a gun that you can hunt, someone who is objectively bad so that you can ignore what you know is true? What happens if you find them? Do they pay the price? It’s okay if the villain dies at the end of a novel – in fact, they’re supposed to. What if that’s what Michael did to Alan? And it’s just the end of Michael’s story you’ve got confused with the start.’ She needed a couple of breaths after that tirade. I digested the truth in her words. ‘We’re here because of you. Michael is in that room because of you. You did this. You’re just like your father. He knew what he was leaving us to fight, and he left us to fight alone anyway, and we paid the price. We all did.’ Her voice was venom. ‘If only he’d left us a weapon to fight it with. But he didn’t. Nothing in the bank. And you did the same thing to Michael.’

For a second I thought she was accusing me of keeping Michael’s money, and I was about to ask her how she knew about it, when I realised she was simply saying that, by dying, our father had left us poor. In truth, we hadn’t grown up that poor. But I didn’t really know what it had been like to raise us alone. In any case, maybe she meant it as a metaphor.

‘Dad was a killer just like Michael.’ I blocked out her argument and stuck with the black and white truth. ‘The only difference was he was a junkie as well.’

‘Your father was not a junkie!’ Audrey bellowed.

‘They found a needle on him, Mum. Stop lying to yourself!’

‘Stop panicking your mother.’ A voice came from behind me: Marcelo, holding a mug of something brown and steaming. He’d said it jokingly, but caught on to the intensity of the room pretty quickly. He slid me out of the doorway with a brush of his forearm. Audrey slunk past, grabbing the drink on the way out and shuffling quickly down the corridor.

Marcelo raised his eyebrows. ‘Everything all right?’

I nodded, but it was so mechanical he saw right through it.