She watched Lily sit, sensed her mum silently urging her to do the same. Seconds passed, then half a minute, Jess’s body tensing, urging her to leave. But then she thought about her mum singing onstage less than two hours before, the triumph on her face as she’d taken her fourth and final bow, and suddenly she found herself stepping forward, pulling out a chair at the end of the table, and sitting down.

Allowing her eyes to flick briefly to where Mia and Phoebe were sandwiching their grandmother, Jess fixed her gaze firmly forward as her mum took in a deep breath.

“I don’t want to get maudlin but sometimes I can’t help feeling that in the year Zoe and your dad died, someone pressed the emergency stop button on my life and I just stopped moving. It’s as though I’ve spent the past thirty years treading water and it’s taken me all this time to see how static my life has been.”

“Don’t be silly, Mum, your life hasn’t been static. You’ve done a brilliant, important job all these years—think of all those thousands of children you’ve encouraged to read. That’s no small achievement. And what about us? You’re an amazing mum, a wonderful grandmother. Your life hasn’t been that bad, has it?”

Something familiar in Lily’s voice—the need to be the first to dive in with proof that she was the kinder of the two sisters—caused Jess’s back teeth to grind together.

“Of course it hasn’t. I know I’ve been lucky in lots of different ways. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things I’d like to have done. Take tonight. Would I ever have joined a choir if I hadn’t known I was dying? It’s silly, really. We all know it’s going to happen to us eventually and yet it’s as though we don’t want to accept that our time is limited until we’re issued with a specific sell-by date.”

There was a pause in which Jess sensed her mum biding her time.

“So that’s why I’ve booked three first-class tickets to New York and five nights at the Plaza Hotel. It’s over a weekend, so you’ll only have to miss a couple of days’ work. All I’m asking is that the two of you come away with me—together—to New York. Can you do that? Can you put your differences aside, just for five days?”

No one spoke. Around her, Jess could hear the ambient hum of other people’s lives, but inside her head the prospect played itself out like a movie she wasn’t sure she wanted to see: Jess, Lily, and their mum playing happy families in New York as if the last twenty-eight years had never happened; the three of them walking through Central Park, watching boaters on the lake, and stepping out of the path of speeding skaters; drinking coffee on the High Line and looking out across the Hudson to New Jersey; navigating their way around the labyrinthine rooms of the Met and marveling at the views from Top of the Rock. Her mum smiling and laughing, one final wish granted.