‘It’s not only that.’ She straightened up, expression full of bewilderment. ‘It’ll be like when we go to the hospital, with people everywhere and concrete and zebra crossings and too much noise. Only all of the time, everywhere I go, and even thinking about it gives me a headache.’

I nodded my understanding. When I’d driven into Nottingham for a meeting a couple of weeks ago, it had transformed into an alien planet, so much hurrying about and so little space. My senses felt suffocated.

‘Everyone will think I’m weird.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

‘I will be weird! I’ll be like a wild rabbit forced to live in a tiny cage with 118,000 domesticated rabbits who think it’s all normal and fine and don’t understand why I can’t even breathe properly squashed into that smelly, polluted, ugly cage.’

‘We can ask Nana and Grandad to take you out into the countryside as much as possible. There’s probably a bus so you can go by yourself.’

I tried to restrain from adding platitudes about how she’d get used to it, and soon learn to love having shops and places to eat and all the other benefits of a small city on her doorstep. That she’d enjoy living in a lovely house, where everything worked, and she could see her grandparents every day. I didn’t even mention that one advantage of a big, new school would be that there were enough ‘weird’ kids there to find some who appreciated your differences, and she might have more friends to hang about with.

I didn’t say a single word about being a ‘normal’ teenager.

Joan, like all of us, was one hundred per cent her own person.

Unlike most of us, she knew who that was and she was completely happy with it.

Plus, how can you console a child having to leave her dog behind?

I would have let her take him, as much as it would have killed me to lose Joan and Nesbit in one go, but Peter was highly allergic to animal fur, and more than ten seconds in an enclosed space with Nesbit resulted in startlingly violent sneezes.

‘I’ll talk to your mum about how often you can come and visit, and I promise I’ll bring Nesbit to see you.’

‘He’d hate it in Chester.’

The phrase that stuck in my windpipe like a fishhook was that it might not be forever, or even for long – just until her mum was back on her feet. Leanne had closed down her business and handed in her notice to the landlord, with a payment from Peter to cover the rest of the rent. Carole spent an afternoon showing Joan the website to a private girls’ school with independent thinking and creating confidence as its key values.

‘Look, Grandad helped build the new arts centre. Isn’t it great?’