I took a deep breath of soupy air for courage and walked over to the chair. Sat down. Our knees touched. I shuffled the chair back. Michael sized me up. At first I thought his eyes were thoughtful, curious, as they ran over the new lines on my face, looking at what three years did to someone. Then I had a second thought: that he was sizing up a meal.

‘I’ve been thinking about Jeremy,’ he said. ‘I know you might be too young to remember exactly. Do you?’

That seemed an obscure place to start, but I figured it was best to go along with it. ‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘I mean . . . well, sometimes I wonder if I actually remember it, or if I’ve just absorbed enough descriptions that my brain has stitched something together. There’s a point where I lose which parts are real and which parts are gaps I’ve filled in myself.’ I had been only six, and I knew that I hadn’t been awake for most of that day, so a lot of it had to be a construction. ‘I have dreams, and it’s weird, because sometimes it’s like I’m dreaming someone else’s memories. Sometimes he, well – sometimes he doesn’t . . .’ I trail off.

‘I know what you mean.’ Michael rubbed his forehead, in a strange mimicry of how he’d rubbed it the night he’d shown up at my house with Alan Holton in his car, that small dent from the steering wheel. ‘I know Mum’s been hard on you. I think you were too young to realise how hard it was. Because it went from the five of us together to three, so quickly. Like that.’ He clicked his fingers.

I nodded, remembering the foster parents we’d shared when we’d been removed from Audrey’s care.

‘And when she finally got us back – well, it’s not that she didn’t want to lose us, it’s that she doesn’t want us to lose each other. You ever think about that?’

All the time, I didn’t say. You did this, I didn’t say. A family is not a credit card, I didn’t say.

‘I think about Jeremy a lot,’ I said instead, noncommittal.

‘And the three of us – you and Mum and me – in a year, we’d lost a father and a brother. There’s a reason she waited so long to have Jeremy’s funeral. You remember that, don’t you? I thought she just couldn’t stomach two funerals back-to-back.’

‘Seven years is a long time to wait though,’ I said. I’d been a teenager when we’d had a small ceremony for Jeremy. We did it on his birthday.