Lily’s eyes scanned the notice on the screen. ‘This guy Marvin’s died? He was eighty-seven, so quite a bit older than you, Mum.’ Marvin had been a beloved husband of the late Teresa, a loving dad and granddad, a much-missed brother to Bonnie. ‘I’ve never known you cry over a man.’ As a gay woman, out and proud all her adult life, Roma’s friends were mainly female.

Roma was silent, her face blotched red.

Then realisation caught Lily’s breath. ‘I can think of one man you had a relationship with. But he was some one-night stand whose name you didn’t even know … you said.’ She gazed into her mother’s eyes, at the apprehensive, apologetic agony she read there. ‘Wasn’t he a one-night stand? My father?’

With a noisy swallow Roma shook her head. ‘It was a mess. You know most of the story.’

Lily’s stomach dropped down a shaft. ‘But not all, evidently! Tell me. I want to try to understand.’

Roma covered her eyes. ‘Patsie and I wanted a family. She had a settled career with maternity benefits. She became pregnant with your sister Zinnia via the sensible route: anonymous donor. But I got jealous. I wanted a baby too.’ She clasped her hand over Lily’s as her voice broke. ‘Patsie wouldn’t agree, particularly before the first baby was even here. I was a freelance photographer scraping a living and there was childcare to be considered. If there was to be a second pregnancy then she wanted to have artificial insemination again using the same anonymous donor – possible to arrange even in 1983 – so the babies would be full siblings. I thought she was unbearably pragmatic.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘It wasn’t a one-night stand I had, it was an affair. Marvin was an older man, who, in my reckless, heedless naivety I thought wouldn’t be hurt by me using him. He never knew I was only in the relationship to get pregnant.’

The kitchen clock ticked from above the range cooker, loud in the silence. ‘Why did you lie when I asked about my father?’ Lily demanded, rocked by an unexpectedly keen sense of loss.

Lurching to her feet Roma took down a glass and filled it from the chilled water dispenser in the door of the fridge. Footsteps dragging, she returned to her seat. ‘I met Marvin through a photography job – headshots of managerial staff for a company magazine. He developed a thing for me and let it show. He was shocked when I, a woman in her mid-twenties, responded.’ Colour flooded her cheeks. ‘He was fit and good-looking for early fifties. I thought he’d be kind to me and most of my experience was with women.’ She cleared her throat and raised her gaze to Lily’s. ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’