I let Paula down; I let both of them down, and that’s the bitter, unpalatable truth, and for as much extra time as I’ve been granted, I’ll have to live with it. It fills me with guilty admiration to see Paula now, and recognise how she has changed without me. She’s like someone who has passed through fire, who has survived but come back altered. She sometimes seems frail – strained, tired, worn down – and maybe she is, but at the same time she has become indomitable.

The transformation in Daisy is remarkable. Nothing short of a miracle. The small child I remember, the unpredictable, infuriating, occasionally terrifying little changeling who ruled our home with her dogged and implacable strangeness, has become a gentle girl whose approach to the world is one of both intrigue and bemusement. She smiles; she listens; she even talks a little. Her eyes still slide away from you, but not always; sometimes, just briefly, she takes me in like a kindly scientist peering at something through a microscope. I take that as a sign of trust. It’s clear she bears me no ill will. She tolerates me. Accepts me. She might even miss me when I’m gone.

I had thought her indifferent, unreachable; now it is clear that the world she is in is not one anybody else can share, but is the same one that is around all of us, which, by and large, she seems to find much more absorbing than the people in it. And I think maybe I can see why. It’s not that she doesn’t care for the people, although she finds them sometimes confusing. It’s just that the sky and the trees and the grass are so much more astonishing.

She is still conspicuously different – a tall, thin girl dressed in pink, her favourite colour, with one white sock drooping. She seems younger than she is. Perhaps even when she is old, she’ll still have this child-like quality. But I can see now that there’s something beautiful about it. I have never really appreciated what innocence is. But Daisy has it, and it gives her both vulnerability and freedom.

Daisy doesn’t need to earn other people’s congratulations to make me proud of her. She’s herself and she is here, and that is everything. She herself has shown me what I didn’t want to accept when she was younger: that she is perfect, just as she is.

On Daisy’s other side, slightly ahead of her, is Ellie in an old tie-dye T-shirt and denim shorts and tatty sneakers. She dresses like a rebel, but she still has the nervous focus of the conscientious pupil she used to be before adolescence hit. She looks as if she is expecting something to happen. Good or bad? She seems too apprehensive for it to be clear either way.

At least things are better for her now. More settled. Jenny is certainly less worried about her. The time she gets most anxious about those girls is when Sean reappears in their lives, which he did a week or so ago, freshly returned from his trip to Spain – no idea what he was doing there, running away from himself as usual, I imagine – to take them and Toby out to dinner.