I woke to the whimper of Izzy looking to get out into the yard. As I followed her down the stairs, I felt the wooden boards creak and bow underfoot. I’d still not had the seventh step from the bottom looked at properly after the fall. I’d just learned how to step around the dip where the wood had cracked under the weight of my body slamming against it. I knew I should probably get all of them looked at – one of a growing number of things I needed to get looked at in this old, rattling farmhouse.

If this house were a dog, it would have been put to sleep long ago on humanitarian grounds. I suppose I was scared of what might be found. Woodworm. Damp. Rot. Evidence of what had happened here …

Before she died, Laura had tried to convince me to sell up and move into the spare room of her spacious four-bed new-build in the Waterside. She kept a lovely home and there was no doubt I would have been made most welcome. I knew she hadn’t just been saying it out of politeness; but no – this old farmhouse was my home. I’d spent my entire married life here, raised a family here, buried a husband from here. I’d not leave it until I was carried out in a box myself.

I never imagined I’d bury a daughter from here, too. Never imagined that my perfect family could be obliterated in such a short space of time. Paddy first. Then Laura. Then my son, Aaron, upping and leaving for a new life away from all the pain this house reminded him of. The ghosts of his sister and father were too much for him to take.

But on mornings like this one, when thoughts of all the things that were going wrong troubled me, I wondered if Laura had been right all along and I was, as she’d called me, a ‘stubborn old goat who’d rather prove a point than be comfortable’.

If I closed my eyes I could still see the way she used to wrinkle her nose and purse her lips when she was angry; not that she ever was really angry. Passionate might be a better way to describe her. Determined. Would things have gone differently if I’d moved in with her like she wanted?

Each day, no matter how it started, seemed to bring my thoughts to her within moments. I liked it that way, even if it hurt. I feared for the day I’d wake up and she wouldn’t be there, at the very centre of my existence.