He went off whistling down the stairs, and I wondered how he’d react if I told him everything about my history with Mark. Not that I was about to do that. A little bit of the truth would be quite enough, at least at this stage. It would be more than I’d told my daughters, anyway.

But the prospect of even a cautious chat with a sympathetic outsider was a huge relief. Suddenly I realised how anxious I was about the whole thing, however happy and hopeful I was about Mark. It was because I was happy and hopeful that I was anxious – I wanted so much for it to work. We both did.

We needed it to work. There wouldn’t be another chance.

The chance to offload even a little bit was too good to pass up. Peter wasn’t involved, he didn’t know Mark and he had no axe to grind. I had thought that I needed to talk to Ava… but actually, maybe what I really needed was to let off steam to someone else.

Ava was doing homework in the girls’ bedroom and Ellie was reading in the kitchen. We didn’t have all that many books in the house – I didn’t have a lot of time for reading – but I’d always taken the girls to the library when they were little, and Ava still took Ellie most Saturdays, while I was working. It was scary how quickly one phase succeeded another, without you realising it at the time. For years on end it had seemed as if Ellie read nothing but books about fairies, and now it was Harry Potter – great big books, but she chewed through them like nobody’s business. When she’d finished the series we’d need to find something else.

Neither of them liked the sound of courgette cake – either that, or they realised I wanted a chat with Peter on my own. Or maybe they were just happy doing what they were doing and didn’t fancy being dragged away from it and into social contact, particularly not with their mother and a neighbour who was getting on in years.

My girls weren’t ill-mannered, but they also didn’t go out of their way to find company. They were very different to me like that: I dreaded being alone – both of them seemed to quite like it. I sometimes wondered whether it was my fault, and if perhaps they would have been keener to go to people’s houses or have people round if we’d always lived somewhere that you’d feel comfortable inviting visitors to. Our current flat was fine – we’d been in grottier places – but the girls still didn’t have their own rooms, and when Ellie was a baby, after I’d broken up with Sean, we’d had just one bedroom for all three of us, with me and Ava sharing a double bed and Ellie in a cot to the side. Ava in particular seemed to have got into the mindset that home was out of bounds, and it was inevitable that Ellie would follow her example.