I could see why she was worried; I was, too. Everything Mum had told us, not to mention the way things were between us and our dad, had led us to believe that to have dealings with men was to dice with disaster. And Mum was all we had, all that stood between us and chaos. We both needed her so much that if you stopped to think about it, it was terrifying. We needed her like we needed a place to sleep and breakfast in the mornings, because she was the person who provided both those things and without her absolutely none of the ordinary, everyday things we took for granted, like having a home and food on the table, were guaranteed.

Mum said, ‘Maybe it’s just because we’re so used to nice things not happening that she doesn’t know what to do with herself when they do.’ She put both the vase and the jug on the kitchen table in front of me. ‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’

‘Beautiful,’ I agreed.

The roses were so red it hurt to look at them. I closed my eyes and gave my head a little shake to clear it but the red was still too bright, almost viscous-looking, like blood. I could make out a buzzing or rumbling somewhere that was somehow related to them, a kind of vibration almost like thunder, but too distant to recognise. And once again, a thought dropped into my mind fully formed, as if someone else had put it there.

It isn’t just about her. He wants something else, too.

Mum said, ‘Are you all right?’

I looked up at her – my worn-out mother with the aching shoulders and the sore feet, and the inch of dark in her dyed blonde hair.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. I wrinkled my nose. ‘I think maybe the flowers are giving me hay fever, a little bit. Is there anywhere else you could put them?’

‘In this tiny pill-box of a flat? Not really,’ Mum said, but she moved them to the windowsill.

With the flowers out of my line of sight I felt a bit better. Mum put a readymade pie in the oven and got some potatoes on to boil, and then she sat down with me and asked me about school and told me about some of the people whose hair she’d cut that day.

I didn’t have her to myself that often, so it felt good to be sitting together in our snug little kitchen with the supper cooking and Ava shut away somewhere else. It felt good, but at the same time it felt awful because I could tell she was happy, really happy, too happy even to worry about Ava being in one of her funny moods. And I knew for a certainty – much as I knew that she’d lied to us about how she’d met Mark, and that Mark wanted more than just her, and that the roses spelt danger – that her happiness wasn’t going to last.