“Holly’s a happy, well-adjusted, healthy little girl. You know she is. It wasn’t doing her any harm; she loved seeing them. This is . . . Nobody could have predicted this.”

I wondered, wearily, if that was even true. Personally, I would in fact have bet on at least one member of my family coming to a sticky and complicated end, although my money wouldn’t have been on Kevin. I said, “I keep thinking about all those times I asked what she’d been up to, and she went on about going Rollerblading with Sarah or making a volcano in science class. Chirpy as a little chickadee, not a bother on her. I never once suspected she was hiding anything. It kills me, Liv. It just kills me.”

Olivia’s head turned towards me. “It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, Frank. Truly. She didn’t think of it as lying to you. I told her that we might have to wait a while before we talked to you about it, because you’d had a big argument with your family, and she said, ‘Like that time I had that fight with Chloe, and all week I didn’t even want to think about her or I cried.’ She understands more than you think.”

“I don’t want her protecting me. Ever. I want it to be the other way round.”

Something moved across Olivia’s face, something a little wry and a little sad. She said, “She’s growing up, you know. In a few years she’ll be a teenager. Things change.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.” I thought about Holly sprawled in her bed upstairs, tearstained and dreaming, and about the night we made her: the low triumphant laugh in Liv’s throat, her hair wrapped round my fingers, the taste of clean summer sweat on her shoulder.

After a few minutes Olivia said, “She’ll need to talk about all this, in the morning. It would help her if we were both there. If you want to stay in the spare room . . .”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be good.”

She stood up, shook out the throw and folded it over her arm. “The bed’s made up.”

I tilted my glass. “I’ll finish this first. Thanks for the drink.”

“Several drinks.” Her voice had the sad ghost of a smile in it.

“Those too.”

Behind the sofa she stopped and her fingertips came down, so tentatively I barely felt them, on my shoulder. She said, “I’m so sorry about Kevin.”

I said, and I heard the rough edge on my voice, “That was my baby brother. It doesn’t matter how he went out that window, I should have caught him.”