In a way this was the same. There were signs that I was able to notice, that would have been there whether I was receptive to them or not.

At first it was just little things, and they could have been coincidences. Before the café owner rang to offer me a job, I could feel the good fortune in the air, like snow poised to fall on Christmas Eve. And when I smoked my last cigarette I knew it really was the last. The next day I got through a whole dinner with Dad without taking one of his, which proved it.

There were no words, and there were no sightings of anything or anyone. It was like the ghost of what it had been, an old habit vaguely remembered. And that was fine by me.

And then it was better than fine, because during Ava’s wedding ceremony something glorious happened.

After Felix died, when I’d closed my mind to the things I sometimes glimpsed or sensed, it had been like shutting up a room in a house and leaving it in darkness. Except it had been me who had found myself in the dark. The knowledge I’d been given had been partial and unclear, like a light flicking on and off, and I had decided I would be better off without it: that I’d be spared the guilt that went with knowing only a little, and not being able to change anything. But then I had realised that giving up on the confusion meant giving up on the light as well. I couldn’t summon up the golden warmth that reminded me of my grandmother any more. It had gone along with everything else.

At Ava’s wedding that changed.

I was sitting in the pew reserved for family at the front of the church, between Mum’s rather grumpy sister, my aunt Amanda, and Dad, who looked really nervous and uncomfortable and was furiously tapping his foot. Desperate for a drink, basically. You might have thought he’d take this in his stride – that after all these years, it wouldn’t be such a big deal to see Mark walk Ava down the aisle, instead of him, and give her away. But that obviously wasn’t the case.

We all managed to exchange a few pleasantries about the journeys we’d had to get there and how beautiful the church was and what a lovely day it was for a wedding, and then fell into a slightly dazed silence which could have been prompted by awe or awkwardness, or a combination of the two.

Would Grandma have forgiven Mum for letting Ava grow up thinking my dad was her father? I could see now why Mum had done it. Mark had been married to someone else. And Dad had really loved Mum, in his way. And us. Still did. It was just that he had a problem that made it difficult, almost impossible, for him to love us in a way that allowed us to trust him, and he’d never been able to fix it.