It’s only as he’s rolling his eyes that he shifts his gaze from the table, and then, even though he’s telling himself there’s no way she can be here, not here, in Germany, in this restaurant with these people, he knows she is. He doesn’t know how, or why, just that it is so. She’s gesticulating with her hands and tipping her head back laughing as Magda points to their table and she looks over and their eyes lock. She looks brighter than normal, more functional, and there’s a man with her. An unremarkable man – he has eyes and a nose and a mouth and a jumper and trousers and a coat. She says something to him then, and Magda looks across and then Duke stands up.

‘Hello,’ she says to him as she approaches the table.

He blinks. He might be on the verge of crying. He might be crying already.

He swallows. ‘Hello, Mum.’

It transpires that the unremarkable man is Roger, her new boyfriend.

‘We met in AA, pet,’ she tells him, as they settle into the same corner Magda and Evie gossiped in earlier today. Already that feels like a year ago. The past twenty minutes – paying at the restaurant, deciding to get back to the privacy of the hotel, taking off their coats – has felt like a week. His mother is here? In Germany? To see him?

‘He’s ever so kind to me. Really patient. Got two kids himself, though he’s out of touch with one of them. I told him I know what that’s like.’

If it’s an attempt at bonding, it falls flat for Duke. He’s doing what he has practised with Phoebe so many times: breathing, saving his response until he knows what he wants it to be, picking out the facts that he knows to be concretely true, not hysterical manufactured worries from his imagination.

This is his mother. She is here. She is not drunk. She has a boyfriend.

His mum looks at him expectantly. For a while he called her by her first name, Anna, as a way to articulate that she’s no mother to him. Never to her face, but privately, in sessions or to friends. But it felt forced, like he was trying to be madder than he was. Mostly he’s just always felt sad about her. Sad and lost and hurt.

‘I’m just struggling to connect some dots here, Mum,’ he says, when she sighs contentedly, like she’s over the moon to be here, with him, together. Roger has excused himself to go to the bathroom, but he’s been gone ages already. Maybe he’s giving them some space. ‘How did you know I was here? How did you even get here? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’

She nods along, like she gets why he’d be confused.