As if by unspoken agreement, we’d never actually talked about how we’d fallen out at Mum’s funeral, or how stubborn we’d both been during the years of our estrangement. Amanda seemed to be happy to pick up where we’d left off, and that suited me, too, especially as, after all this time, I could hardly remember exactly what had been said or who’d been wrong, and anyway, it didn’t seem to matter any more.

Ellie was sitting on my other side, at a slight distance, a gawky, skinny-limbed teen in a red dress that was a little too short for a wedding, and clumpy, deliberately unladylike sandals. She’d taken the newlyweds to the hospital in the second-hand Mini Sean had got for her as a guilty twenty-first birthday present – it had fallen to her to drive, as the only member of the immediate family who was stone cold sober. Since we’d settled in the waiting room she’d opted to cut herself off by listening to music, and had that mute, closed-off expression teenagers get when they really don’t want to talk to anybody about anything.

If somebody had asked me the day before whether she was close to Mark, I’d have said no. I might even have said – flippantly, bitterly – that she’d barely notice whether he lived or died. But I was under no such illusion now. They might not be close – in fact, they were poles apart – but that didn’t mean she didn’t care.

It was no time, really, to criticise him… but he hadn’t helped matters by being so inflexible when she went through her phase of going off the rails. He’d set boundaries for her with a rigidity that was driven more by his need to be in control than by wanting to see her take better care of herself. And she’d known it, and had provoked him and pushed him at every opportunity. Still, things had improved, and over recent months they had moved towards a sort of wary truce.

Thank goodness for Peter, who’d taken Ellie in and was keeping an eye on her. Mark wasn’t crazy about the arrangement, but he hadn’t been in much of a position to object. Ellie’s earlier attempts to live away from home had been short-lived – awful places, worse boyfriends – and her behaviour when she was with us had been so chaotic that at one point he’d wanted to throw her out.

It was as if, as a teenager, she’d made a conscious decision to be the exact opposite of the thoughtful, bookish, otherworldly child she had been – as if she wanted to do everything she could to put distance between herself and us, and disappear into a cycle of parties and hangovers and insecure relationships.

Mark had been angry with her, and sometimes I had been too, but it had been hard to stay angry when I knew the way she was carrying on was to do with Felix – was a delayed reaction to the shock of his loss, and to the sadness in the house afterwards. It was a kind of grief, a self-punishing way of proving to herself and us that she was still alive.