And even though I was slightly wounded by this, I had to admit that he was right.

‘And she’s doing French, isn’t she? For her GCSEs? And she’s never been to France? Well, better late than never.’

I said, ‘There would be passports and things to sort out.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about all that. You can actually do it pretty quickly if you need to.’

‘I suppose.’

‘I’d like to tell Ava first. I think I’ll know when it’s the right moment. And then you could explain it all to Ellie.’

‘Don’t you think we should sit down with both of them, all four of us together?’

He pulled a face. ‘Really? I can’t say that’s how I’ve imagined it.’

‘But we don’t want either of them to feel left out of anything,’ I pointed out. ‘And they both need to know. We have to face this as a family, together. We have to start as we mean to go on.’

‘You’ll be inviting Sean along next,’ he said, with a cold look that was almost a rebuke. Then he held up his hands. ‘OK, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just nervous about it. That’s all.’

‘I know. So am I. More than nervous. Terrified. But we have to tell them, and we have to do it right.’

‘OK. If that’s how you want to do it, that’s how we’ll do it. We’ll sit them down and tell them together.’ He interlocked his fingers and pushed his hands away from him, stretched out his arms and shoulders and exhaled. ‘We’ll go away in May, and when we come back, it’ll be sorted. And there’ll be nothing that Sean or anyone else can do about it.’

‘Mark,’ I said. ‘Does she know?’

He finished his beer and put the empty glass back down. ‘You mean Paula? You really don’t need to worry about her. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with me, remember? She was very clear about that. Anyway, how would she find out? Unless someone tells her, she’s got no way of knowing. And I’m not about to fill her in. Apart from anything else, it’s really nothing to do with her.’

‘I suppose so. I guess… I just wondered how she would feel about it.’

‘About what? About us being together?’

I sipped a little bit more apple juice.

Really, why hadn’t he guessed? He was the one with the degree, the top-drawer education, the fancy job. How could anyone so intelligent and successful be so blind?

But then, he thought the biggest possible deal was what Ava and Ellie would think once they knew the truth. He’d forgotten that there might be something else to think about. Something that would change things for all of us just as fundamentally as the news we had just agreed to share with the girls. Maybe even more so.

I put my glass down carefully on the coaster on the glass-topped table. Whatever he said later, his first reaction wouldn’t be a lie. I’d know straight away whether this was really what he wanted.