He turns to me fully then, his eyes searching out mine in the dusk.

‘Does that make me sound crazy?’

‘No, not at all.’

He lets out a deep sigh, leaning forward in the chair and scraping his hands through his hair. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen him without his beanie or a baseball cap, and his hair is dark and wavy, like Stanley’s.

‘The hardest part was telling Stan she’d died. How could I explain it to him when it didn’t make sense to me? That you can get in a car one day and drive off like normal and never come back. That it can be nobody’s fault. That if she’d set off a few minutes later, everything would be different; that truck would have finished turning, she wouldn’t need to brake, the car wouldn’t have skidded off the icy road.’

His voice chokes and I watch as Ben rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. Instinctively I want to offer up some words of comfort, but just as instinctively I know there are none.

‘Stanley asked me if she’d gone to heaven to be with Granddad – I think he must have got that from his grandma. At the time that seemed to comfort him, so I said yes. But now I don’t know if I did the right thing.’ He shakes his head, staring off into the middle distance. ‘Stanley talks about her being a star.’

‘You were trying to protect him.’

‘But I can’t protect him from the truth for ever can I?’

‘You don’t have to.’

He looks at me then.

‘My mum died when both my sister and I were young,’ I say softly. ‘It was terrible, but the worst part was Dad never spoke about her any more. It was too painful for him. He never mentioned her again and we were too afraid to, because he would cry and we didn’t want to upset him. If it wasn’t for our grandparents, it would be like she’d never existed.’

‘I never knew about you losing your mum – when we were kids, I mean.’

‘We didn’t talk about it,’ I shrug. ‘We felt like we couldn’t, so instead we buried our emotions. But you can never truly bury them, can you? Loss and grief don’t magically disappear; they just find a different outlet, whether it’s drink or drugs or depression . . .’ I trail off. ‘You have to find a way to deal with it, and we dealt with it in different ways.’

I look across at Ben, but his face is in shadow and I can’t see his expression.

‘As long as you keep talking about her with Stanley – letting him ask questions even if you don’t know the answers, showing him it’s OK to cry, to feel confused – it’ll work itself out. There’s no right or wrong. You just have to make it up as you go along.’

‘Like life, really.’

‘Yeah, like life,’ I murmur.