It was surprisingly therapeutic, stacking chairs and sweeping floors. The hall wouldn’t be in use again until term restarted, so Jed and I removed the paper chains and gaudy streamers while the children helped Mia undress the trees. It felt eerily quiet without Mum and Dad there until Elana plugged her phone into the sound system, clicking on ‘Joy Papplewick’s Greatest Hits’, and we sang and danced, laughed and cried as we set about restoring order.

‘You said you wanted to talk about family stuff?’ I asked Jed as we started winding fairy lights into loops neat enough for my mother to approve.

Jed glanced up. ‘This might seem like the wrong time to discuss it, but with Nana Joy being so ill, I think we need to decide what to do – if anything – about finding Dad’s father.’

‘What, you mean in case she dies?’ I choked back the dread scrabbling up my throat.

He carried on looping, face grim. ‘Possibly. Or, if she’s seriously ill. What do we do, if we find him?’

‘You mean, do we tell her?’ I used a piece of wire to secure one perfectly even loop in place and started on the next section. ‘The chances are it won’t come to that. If he’s died, or doesn’t happen to have a spare half a million pounds to give away, or does have money but doesn’t want anything to do with his supposed son.’ I stopped to look at him. ‘Oh. That’s why we need to decide now. Because if we do find him, we’ll need Nana Joy to corroborate it.’

He shrugged. ‘It had crossed my mind. We can’t turn up on an elderly man’s doorstep and chuck this grenade at him on a hunch.’

‘Crap.’ I sat down on a plastic storage crate. ‘This is really, really difficult.’

‘Yes. But like you said, it’s really, really important. We don’t need to make any big decisions yet. All I’m saying is that if we do want to follow this through, depending on if and who or what we uncover, it might be best if we uncover it sooner rather than later.’ He stopped then, swallowing hard as he fought to control the emotion. ‘It’s horrible. I feel like a monster even bringing it up. But I know Nana Joy wouldn’t want us to lose Charis House if we didn’t have to, if she could help…’

‘I think when life gets turned upside down, all you can do is take it one step at a time. There’s no harm in carrying on the search for now. Like you said, it probably won’t lead anywhere, but at least we’ll have tried. If we do find something, we can worry about it then.’

‘So, we keep looking?’