‘I won’t,’ she said, immediately serious. She took his hand.

‘I looked for you, y’know,’ Dan said. ‘When you disappeared from Sheffield. I looked for you. I didn’t know where you lived – and that nearly killed me, the shame of not knowing – but anyway I knew it was Attercliffe and your house wasn’t that hard to find, once I started asking people about Alison Connor.’

She was very pale now, and silent, watching him, and he didn’t want to cause her pain, dragging up an unwelcome past, but God Almighty, he’d suffered as never before or since when she left him, and to this day he had no idea why she’d gone. ‘I found your mother,’ he said.

Ali withdrew her hand and felt a bloom of cold sweat beneath her shirt, and an old, familiar tightening in her throat and gut, a constriction that made her breathing shallow and difficult. She saw Catherine, mottled bare legs, short skirt, cleavage that guaranteed a few free drinks, and the old stale musk of fag smoke, spilled booze and urine. And she saw Daniel, that beautiful boy, trying to get some sense out of her, trying to piece together a story he’d never really understand.

‘She didn’t help,’ Dan said. ‘She couldn’t.’

Ali shook her head, only the slightest gesture really, barely discernible, but conveying undiluted misery. ‘Can we not do this?’ she said. ‘Not yet?’

He shrugged and stared into his glass. He felt strongly that the time, in fact, ought to be now; God knows, an explanation was long overdue. But he could see her distress – it was palpable, almost feral – and from what he remembered of Catherine Connor, he could understand she might be a mother to forget. Peter had been more approachable; there was humanity in his eyes. But also, he’d been cagey, on edge, always glancing sidelong at the door, at the window, at Catherine, as if there was nothing here he could trust. Still, though, he’d offered Daniel a glass of water, and sat him down before telling him Alison was gone for good.

‘I wrote to you,’ Ali said. He was startled, amazed.

‘Did you? When?’

‘I’d been away about three months. I was in Paris by then, and I wrote to you, three times, as soon as I had a permanent address. I thought you might turn up, or write back at least, but then I decided you probably hated me.’

‘Alison, oh my God, Alison, if I’d got a letter from you, nothing would’ve stopped me coming to you.’

‘They didn’t arrive, then?’

‘Christ knows. I would’ve been in Durham by then, trying to be a student.’ He thought about that abortive first term, the piercing sense of loss that he had carried there with him from Sheffield.

‘But my letters … did your mum ever forward your post to you at uni?’