After a while Ellie and I helped Ingrid clear the table and she brought out a pot of coffee and a little silver dish of peppermints.

Did other families do this – sit round pretending everything was normal when it wasn’t? Perhaps they did. Perhaps this was an essential skill for family life… along with knowing what secrets you could get away with keeping, and when you were going to have to come clean about others.

So Mark was a dad already. It wasn’t really that surprising – he was kind of old. There was a pretty high probability that anyone Mum started dating would have a kid. If not more than one.

I sometimes talked to Toby Andrews at school about stuff like that. Maybe because he had a crush on me, he seemed to think I was a good person to talk to, even though, in the normal way of things, I really wasn’t. Toby had three step-brothers, shared a room with one of them and hated them all. Step-sibling relationships, as far as I could tell, were like other sibling relationships, but with even less in common. Light relief from the parent or parents, sometimes, and the forced bonding of enduring the same domestic set-up. But also, frequently seriously annoying.

At least I’d had plenty of time to get used to Ellie. Even if, as it turned out, we only shared one parent and not two…

Last thing I needed was yet another kid around. The baby was quite enough to be going on with. Was it callous of me, being unbothered about this other one being out of the picture? It just seemed to make things easier. Because if she was how Ingrid had described her, what on earth would we say to her if we did meet her? It wouldn’t just be awkward. It would be completely impossible.

Ingrid and Mark and I had coffee, which made me feel as if I was more one of them than I was like Mum or Ellie. Well, I was, wasn’t I? I didn’t go out of my way to be nice to people, and I quite liked expensive things and sometimes other people thought I was a bit up myself. Yeah, I was a Walsh all over. My father’s daughter, learning how to live a double life. There I was with my big secret, my hot affair with an older man, my thoroughly lost innocence, and nobody had any idea.

It seemed that it was a whole lot easier to live with a secret than to be exposed. There must be people all over who understood that. Adulterers, bigamists, people who knew where the bodies were buried but fancied a quiet life.

I was a liar. So how could I condemn Mark for being one too?

After coffee we all said thank you and goodbye to Ingrid in the entrance hall to her flat and went out to the car park, where Mum’s old banger was parked next to Mark’s Jag. Mark said to Mum, ‘Do you still want to call in at the house?’