She wasn’t the greatest advertisement for pregnancy. Miracle of new life and all that, yes, but she did seem pretty tired and she wasn’t exactly glowing. Maybe that was just a myth that had been put about to con women into keeping on having babies. Like telling kids that if they ate their carrots, they’d end up being able to see in the dark. Mum had told me that and I’d always eaten my carrots and the dark still looked like dark to me.

After that morning, we didn’t really talk about it. We didn’t really talk about anything, other than the kind of things you talk about on holiday; where we would go next, what we would do, what we would eat. I didn’t want to talk. What more was there to say? It wasn’t like anyone had asked for my opinion – just my blessing, after the event.

All that remained was for me to get my head round it. I was no longer the daughter of an unreliable alcoholic who had walked out on us when my little sister was a baby. I was now the daughter of a control freak who’d had a one-night stand with my mother when he was married to someone else, and who’d looked her up when he finally got divorced, then got her pregnant once again. They certainly had a good hit rate where conception was concerned. Maybe they’d just keep going, like one of those Victorian couples with a dozen kids: one for every year they were together, but with a sixteen-year-gap between me and Junior.

I carried on calling him Mark. I thought I’d probably start calling Dad Sean. If we ever saw him again. If Mark hadn’t scared him off for good. How much did I really need a dad, anyway? I was sixteen years old, not far off adulthood. But all of a sudden I had two of them: the returning sperm donor and the distant drunk. Two dads too many. I wasn’t sure that either of them really deserved to be called Dad, however much they would have liked it.

How could Mum and Sean have lied to me for so long, and so convincingly? It was a lesson well learned. I’d always remember it: it was almost impossible to know whether other people, even the ones closest to you, were telling the truth or not.

I didn’t know what to say to Mark, and he didn’t really know what to say to me: our every conversation was a misfire, an anti-climax. There was no way of reclaiming all the years we’d lost. Whatever we had would always buckle under the weight of what it wasn’t, and could have been.

And yet there we were. Eating together. Walking to the beach together. Lying on the same stretch of sand. Swimming in the same sea.

When I actually saw him, it was hard to carry on hating him. He was just a man, after all. A man who’d done something he’d regretted, and had tried to put it behind him… and had finally decided to face it.