She made herself a mug of tea and opening the cupboard where she kept the tin of chocolate biscuits, she took one out. Then another for good measure. She was in need of something comfortingly indulgent, and calories, as everyone knew, as she liked to joke, didn’t count when consumed in the night or in the garden. She sat in the old rocking chair to one side of the Aga – the chair which had belonged to her grandmother, then her mother, and now her. Who, she wondered, of her two daughters would have it when the time came? Would Martha feel the chair should be hers because she was the eldest, but would Willow actually want it for sentimental reasons as opposed to a sense of entitlement?

With sudden wistfulness, she thought of all those times she had nursed the girls as newborns in this chair, then gently rocked them off to sleep. Maybe because she was the second child, Willow had been the easiest of the two to feed and settle. She never woke up crochety or cried with angry, face-crunching intent. She was, as the visiting midwife once said, a dream of a baby. A dream of a baby who grew into a sunny-natured dreamer who was happy to drift along like a feather carried on the breeze.

While Colin had despaired of what he considered to be Willow’s airy-fairy-ness and lack of direction, Naomi had instead cherished what she regarded as their youngest daughter’s innate goodness. But she wondered now if that had been a mistake on her part. Had she shielded Willow too much from the real world, made her incapable of fighting for her place in it? There had been something slightly off-key about Willow yesterday. She had seemed tired and occasionally absent from the conversation around the table. More airy-fairy-ness, Colin would have said with a roll of his eyes.

In contrast to her sister’s sweet nature as a baby, Martha had emerged from the womb with her fists flailing, ready to take on the world. Yet as Martha grew older, and for all her toughness and outward confidence, Naomi glimpsed a softer and more vulnerable child doing her best not to lose face or ever show weakness. From such a young age, and with Colin championing her, Martha had set her sights so high. But had that also been a mistake? Had it put too much pressure on her?

Children were so precious and parenthood so very precarious. Did anyone ever think they had got it right one hundred per cent?

Taking a sip from her mug of tea, Naomi recalled with fond nostalgia her daughters in all the various incarnations of their lives. In the semi-darkness, she saw their childhood shadows dancing around the kitchen. She heard their cries of delight as she unveiled the birthday cakes she’d made for them, their cries when they were hurt and their howls of indignation at some unfairness or other. She heard their laughter too when Colin played a practical joke on them. One of their favourite games when they’d been small was for him to adopt the role of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. For such a large man he had been surprisingly light on his feet and they never heard him creeping up on them, not until he was practically on top of them and they were shrieking with giddy terror at the words Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a little-un, which was his spin on the classic line.