‘Yeah,’ Rani said at last. ‘Yeah, you know, I think something did happen. But I don’t know what it was. Suddenly he and Abhi were both gone.’

Two months later, she told me, Abhi returned to the ashram, by himself.

So I was right. Something had happened that made Dad leave.

‘But you’d have to ask Abhi about that,’ Rani said.

‘I have,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried. He doesn’t want to talk to me.’

‘I’ll have a word to him,’ Rani said. ‘You know, I can remember your dad wrote us a letter from Australia to say you’d been born and would we be your godparents. He’d changed his name back to Vincent by that stage. I’m your godmother, I think. Did you know that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t.’

‘I guess I’ve been a bit absent,’ Rani said.

There was another pause. I didn’t ask Rani how it felt to have abandoned her actual child all those years ago. In a way, I felt I already knew the answer. Or, I already almost knew the answer. I already knew that it was possible to do such a thing, and that a part of you must close like a fist to do it. Earlier that evening, before I’d left the house, I had sat for a minute, watching Sylvie while she played on the carpet with a bowl of wooden fruit. She had annoyed me for most of the day, or, at the very least, I had found myself for most of the day simply enduring her. But in that moment, she glowed and shielded me from Sarah, who had just come home from work, and who I had avoided looking at for the past forty-eight hours.

‘I have to go,’ I’d told Sarah, standing up abruptly and walking past her, towards the front door. Then I came back and stooped to kiss Sylvie on her small, dark head. Her heady-head-head.

‘These are the apples,’ Sylvie said to no one in particular, ‘but I call them children. And this is the mumma. And the dadda has gone to have some beer.’

17.

17.

The months passed. Sylvie turned four. I spent every Friday with her, pushing swings in the park and staring at my phone like an idiot. I couldn’t help it. We jumped from rock to rock. We didn’t step on the cracks. We built little nests in the roots of trees, and collected seeds and bits of fluff, and broken pieces of shiny plastic that I found weeks later in the pockets of all my jackets. If it rained, we went to the museum, but it hardly ever rained. Once, we went to a climate-change rally, where Sylvie held a sign, and got bored and hot, and wanted to leave before the speeches had even begun.

‘Pretend we’re mechanics now,’ she said.

‘We’re mechanics now,’ I said.