I instinctively glance towards him, and he catches my eye and smiles. ‘Yes,’ I say, looking back at Julia. ‘He’s a good man. But you know that.’

She smiles. ‘He is. I guess we’re kindred spirits.’

‘Did you play together when you were little?’

She shakes her head. ‘No, Finn is older than me. But we have Kyla in common; she’s the reason we bonded.’

I recall how she told me Kyla was her half-sister too.

‘Kyla cast a shadow over both our lives when she died. We spent our childhoods in different decades, but both suffered the same gloomy darkness.’

I take a sip of my wine, hoping if I stay silent, she’ll go on.

‘My father, Michael Collis, fell in love with Ruth when they were seventeen. I guess their relationship was a bit like Romeo and Juliet – rivalling families. Ruth’s father had won part of the Drummondale estate in a poker game with my grandfather. My grandmother, an awful woman by all accounts, bore a grudge against Ruth’s parents. She certainly didn’t think Ruth was good enough for my father.

‘My dad got Ruth pregnant, but by the time Ruth realised, Dad had gone off to university.’

‘And Ruth’s baby was Kyla?’ I ask, swallowing down more wine.

She nods. ‘My grandmother found out Ruth was having Dad’s baby, and told Ruth that my dad had got engaged to someone else while at university, that he didn’t love her and didn’t want a child.’

‘That’s so cruel. Ruth must have been broken-hearted.’

Julia nods. ‘She was. As I say, my gran was cruel. Anyway, Ruth’s mother forced her to marry a man who’d been giving Ruth the eye. She didn’t care too much who he was, just that Ruth was married.

‘The truth was, my father wasn’t engaged, but when he discovered Ruth was married with a child, he married my mother.

‘It was some years later that Finn was born. And then Ruth’s husband left her.’

‘And then Kyla died?’

Julia tosses her plait back over her shoulder, and nods. ‘That was three years later on Vine Hill. It was after her death that Ruth told my father that Kyla was his daughter. Dad went to pieces. Mourning a child he didn’t know he had. He couldn’t believe Ruth had never told him.

‘He put the bench in the grounds, and spent most of his time there. Even when I was born, his mind was always on Kyla, and what might have been. In the end my mother left him … and me.’

‘I’m so sorry.’