She left the bouquet in an inch of water and went off to our bedroom and shut the door, and I settled back down at the kitchen table and carried on reading Harry Potter. I was distracted by the red roses, though. They looked like something that ought not to be in our kitchen, or in our lives – as if they’d been beamed down by an alien spaceship.

I couldn’t wait for Mum to get home. I wanted to see how she’d react – that was what was going to tell me if Mark was some creepy old guy who’d had a trim and developed a fixation, like Ava had said, or if he was a genuine, proper romance. Someone who might sweep Mum off her feet.

When she did come in, she was talking – she was always talking, even after a whole day on her feet hearing about people’s kids and their difficult old parents and their health problems. She had an inexhaustible supply of chat, but she knew when to listen, too. She always said that what people really paid her for was the chance to offload, not the haircuts, and if she could only charge them what a psychotherapist would, all our money worries would be over.

‘Ugh, it is so cold out there, and my feet are killing me.’

Then she saw the flowers.

She’d taken her shoes off at the door and put her slippers on, but she still had her coat on; it made her look eccentric, like someone on the way to being a bag lady. She approached the sink as if drawn towards some kind of miracle. Her shoulders hunched and one hand went up to her mouth. She didn’t say anything.

‘Mum? Mum, are you all right? Are you crying?’

‘No, no, I’m fine. It’s just a bit of a surprise, that’s all.’

‘There’s a card. Don’t you want to see who they’re from?’

I got the feeling she already knew. Hopefully that meant it wasn’t some completely random oddball or stalker. Though maybe it made the stalker thing more likely, not less.

She found the card, turned it over, read it.

‘I’m guessing you’ve had your sticky little fingers on this,’ she said.

‘Well.’ There didn’t seem much point in denying it. ‘I just sort of happened to see it. Who’s Mark?’

Mum let go of the card and sighed and stretched – cutting people’s hair all day gave her terrible backache. It was obvious how pleased she was about the flowers. She was blushing slightly, and she suddenly looked about ten years younger.

She wasn’t the Ava kind of pretty – she was more friendly-looking, and also, she tended to look a little bit frayed at the edges, like a school shirt that had been worn and washed and ironed so often there was no hiding the fact it was plain worn out. People didn’t always notice her. But when she was happy like this, she would have made an impression on anyone.