Normally, I went to see her alone. Very occasionally, Gramps would come too, but the two of them struggled to do much more than exchange pleasantries – until it was time to leave at least, when he’d part with the same words every time: ‘Chin up, love. Might never happen.’ Sometimes Mum even completed the sentence for him.

He’d always be kind of grumpy afterwards for a few hours, muttering on the way home about how she needed to pull herself together. It was only when Aunty Kaye used to come with me that we’d all have a laugh and forget where we were.

But Sophia understood. She understood like Aunty Kaye did. I could feel it.

Could I take her? Could it be like it used to be? Mum would love her, I was certain of that. But my last few visits had been Bad Days. Mum wouldn’t want someone new seeing her like that. The memory of them was incompatible with my sunny imagining of the three of us, easy in each other’s company. The fact that still, after all these years, I’d never found the right moment to address the fact that I always called her Mummy weighed on my mind just a little too. I’d need to square that before a Sophia visit.

‘We’ll do it,’ I told her. ‘Not tomorrow. But I promise we’ll do it.’

I told Sophia about the last Saturday. As a woman who for years had run ten miles a day before breakfast, finding her in pyjamas and baggy dressing gown in the early afternoon was never a hopeful sign. She’d talked at her fluffy slippers for the duration, only fixing me in her watery stare when she begged me to take her home with me. She ignored the tea I poured her from the tartan flask I always took along, not believing I hadn’t let it out of my sight since filling it at home, convinced it’d been tampered with – that it didn’t look right or smell right.

As usual, she insisted that she was being watched, and I followed her as she stomped to her room and pointed shakily at the device through which she was sure thoughts were being planted in her head as she slept. Climbing up on her dressing table, I taped a pillowcase round the defunct light fitting, for which she thanked me profusely. She curled up on the bed and confided how the chaplain had told her not to come to the chapel again, saying that God could do nothing for her now. She made me leave after an hour, certain she was somehow infecting me. ‘I love you too much,’ she said. ‘You have to go.’

It felt so good to tell someone, to shed the weight.

Sophia squeezed my hand. ‘You’re an awesome son to her, Ollie. I bet she’s proud.’ I shrugged.