“Seriously?” I said. “No locks on the doors? What are you thinking? What if he’s unhinged? For all we know he could be a killer,” and while I was saying it, something dark scuttled down an alley in my stomach, this idea that I might be right, that this was my fate, set already, bound to happen. Game over. Job done.

“Plus it’s miles away,” I said again, into the void Mum left by not responding. “No joke, Mum. You’ve lost your actual mind.”

“No, Jude,” she said, folding into her chair like a dropped flag. “I’ve lost everything else.”

Everything else translated loosely as Mark, her boyfriend for just under a year, her latest Holy Grail, her answer to just about every question under the sun. Mark wasn’t all that, but he was all right. He was pretty nice to her and he didn’t act like I was the unwanted guest or the icing on the cake, unlike some previous boyfriends I could mention. He worked in insurance and you’d think from the way she batted her eyelashes at him when he droned on about assets and premiums that a man in insurance was all she’d ever wanted, the sum total of her heart’s desires. My mum is a very good actor. She couldn’t give a shit about insurance. What she wants is not to be alone.

Anyway, Mark had taken his assets and premiums elsewhere, and because he was also our landlord, that included the roof over our heads. Mum was still in phase one, acting like it was the end of the world, which it blatantly wasn’t. She was doing that thing she does where she just takes for granted that it’s me and her against the world, without even asking if I was on her side for this one. She said, “Can you believe this is even happening to us?” and when I pointed out it was actually her decision to drop everything and drag me to a sad-sounding, pensioner-dense, end-of-the-road, far-as-the-eye-could-see whites-only seaside town from her distant past, she welled up and went all defenseless wounded puppy on me, because it works every time and she knows it. Takes the sting right out of my fight.