“I suppose it would be difficult for your mother as well,” Jon Fleming mused. It was a pointed muse.

And just for a moment, I could see the interview as if I was streaming it there and then: Obviously I would have loved to go to Luc’s wedding, but Odile, she can be so unstable. I tried to defug my head, which was difficult given how late I’d been out the previous night. “Are you really telling me I have to invite you to my wedding or you’ll shit on Mum in the tabloids?”

“Of course not.” He sounded offended, the way obnoxious people always sounded offended when you confronted them with their obnoxious behaviour.

Well, this sucked. On one level, I knew my mum could take care of herself. After all, she’d been taking care of herself for years, and she’d got spectacularly good at giving no fucks in her old age. On another, less rational level, I always hated it when my crap blew back on her. But I could do this. I was a strong, independent person and I could handle my dad being a bully. “Are you sure,” I tried, “because it sounds a lot like that is what you’re saying and…well…remember that my fiancé is a barrister.”

Technically, of course, he wasn’t that sort of barrister. I was just hoping that Jon Fleming’s inability to pay attention to anything that wasn’t himself meant he wouldn’t realise.

“I’ve never had much time for lawyers,” Dad replied. And perhaps I was imagining it, but he sounded cagier than he would have if he’d considered it a totally empty threat.

“Yeah, but lawyers are like gravity,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve got time for them, it matters that they’ve got time for you. And if you did start telling the Mail or the Mirror anything about Mum that could be considered, y’know, libellous, then I’d actually know who to talk to now. In fact”—I decided to push my luck—“these days I even know a high-court judge or two.”