I had something with strawberries in to try to be healthy, but Ellie went for chocolate mousse, as she always did. It was served in a little glass pot, and she scraped it completely clean. Like always.

Seeing that gave me a pang of something – I don’t know what. Like I’d been somewhere else, these last few days. Like I’d begun to miss her – my serious, intense, goofy little sister, who always ate her chocolate mousse right up.

I gave the complimentary chocolate that came with my coffee to Ellie without her asking, and she took it with a little smile that was almost teary.

She definitely must be finding all this overwhelming. But then, she was still pretty young, and she took things to heart. In spite of everything – the lack of money and Sean’s unreliability and the moving around – Mum had somehow managed to provide us with stability. That had gone, now. Everything was shifting, and it wasn’t so surprising for Ellie to be stressed out by that.

Suddenly Ellie came out with a question that she must have been mulling over for some time: ‘So are you going to get married in church?’

Mum and Mark exchanged glances. ‘Neither of us is particularly religious,’ Mark said. ‘We’re planning a very small registry office ceremony, with dinner at a really good restaurant afterwards.’

Ellie’s face fell again. None of this was panning out in line with her most dearly held dreams. ‘So… how many people?’

Another exchange of glances. They might not have been together for long, but Mum and Mark definitely had the non-verbal communication thing down pat.

The upshot seemed to be that it was down to Mum to handle this one. ‘We were thinking we’d keep it small,’ she said. ‘After all, the really important thing is to make it a special day for the four of us. Five of us.’

‘How small?’ Ellie wanted to know.

‘Well, just family.’

‘But we don’t have any family,’ I objected. ‘You’re not about to invite long-lost Aunt Amanda, are you?’

‘No, but there’s Mark’s mother, who we’re all going to meet really soon, hopefully. Mark’s house is quite near her flat, so we’ll almost be neighbours.’

Mum said this with a smile that was meant to broadcast how much she was looking forward to this meeting, but only succeeded in showing how nervous she was about it.

I said, ‘So it’s going to be us and Mark’s mother… and that’s it?’

‘Yes, well, I’m afraid she’s the only living relative that Mark and I can summon up between us. That we’re still speaking to, I mean.’

I glanced at Ellie, expecting her to be tragically disappointed. But she was looking at something on the other side of the room. Then she screwed her eyes tight shut and opened them, and blinked a couple of times as if she’d got something in her eye and was trying to clear it out.

‘Ellie,’ I said, ‘are you OK?’