We put his name down on Ava’s birth certificate – ‘After all, it might as well be true,’ Sean had said – and a few months later we tied the knot.

What a disaster that had turned out to be.

Well, not completely a disaster, because I had Ellie. But not easy, either.

I looked out of the window and listened to Ava’s steady breathing and the occasional riffling sound of Ellie turning pages.

What had happened was as close as Mark and I would get to turning back the clock. And this time, we would get it right.

We had to.

For years, the girls had been all I had. I’d lost my parents. I’d lost my sister, though she was still alive. And Sean was Sean, lost from the start, though I hadn’t realised it.

Now I had Mark and a new baby on the way. But I couldn’t allow the price of that to be a more distant relationship with Ellie and Ava. There was absolutely no way in the world I was ever going to lose anybody who was close to me again.

My falling-out with Amanda had started with her accusing Sean of being drunk at Mum’s wake, which he was, of course. I defended him anyway, and then she asked him to leave, which he did, and told me I was a bad mother for letting him carry on seeing the kids, and I told her to stay out of it and called her a snob and other things were said that shouldn’t have been. Afterwards neither of us had made the effort to apologise, and the row had hardened into an estrangement and become fixed. An end point. Perhaps it had always been inevitable that without Mum to hold us together, we were bound to fall out. I just never would have imagined that it could happen so quickly, or so completely.

But even when I didn’t see Amanda any more, even though we didn’t call or send Christmas cards, I still thought about her.

Sometimes the people we haven’t spoken to for years are the ones who made us who we are. More than anyone else, Amanda was the person who turned me into a hairdresser. And if I hadn’t become a hairdresser, I never would have met Mark.

When she was a girl Amanda’s hair was long, blonde and curly, just like Ava’s. I always wanted to play with it, and she would never let me. She was much older than me, and she was always the kind of person who knows her own mind.

One of the quickest ways to annoy her was to shorten her name. She wanted to be serious, and she didn’t see nicknames as affectionate. She saw them as evidence of disrespect. When she was my age, people had called her Mandy, but then she had insisted that everyone ought to use her full name. And everyone did, which tells you something about her strength of will and stubbornness.