‘You are?’ Kit exclaims. ‘Well, then,’ he says, holding up another bag, ‘you’d better not have this muffin – it’s got chocolate chips in it, and those are poisonous for dogs.’

‘Mmmm,’ croons Tui, sticking out her chin and opening her mouth in a wide grin. ‘Chocolaaate.’

Deft as a cruise ship magician, Kit gives Tui her muffin whilst somehow managing to unknot and retie her jumper around her hips at the same time. When he clocks my look of admiration, he laughs.

‘Not my first time,’ he says.

The four of us take our assorted breakfast bits down towards the shore of the lake. The water here looks as thick and dense as gloss paint, and is the deep, bruised blue of a thunderous sky. Griff sits down on a wooden bench and closes his eyes, luxuriating in the warmth of the sunshine as he absent-mindedly rubs sausage roll crumbs out of his beard. Tui, meanwhile, has finished her muffin at a speed that would impress even chief-of-the-cake-devourers Hayley, and is busy selecting stones to chuck into the water, the first of which sends a lurking gull scuttling away in noisy alarm.

‘Quite something, right?’ Kit remarks, between mouthfuls of bacon roll.

‘It’s so serene,’ I tell him, assuming that he means the view and not the bird. ‘Even in the quietest spots back home, you can usually hear the rumble of traffic, but here, there’s barely a sound. It’s so peaceful.’

As if on cue, Tui lets out a very long and loud burp, before collapsing into shouty hiccups of laughter.

Kit rolls his eyes.

‘You were saying?’

I grin back at him.

‘She’s brilliant,’ I say simply. ‘A comedy genius.’

‘That girl is the sweet potato of Bonnie’s patch,’ Kit agrees. ‘I reckon she would do literally anything for her – you know?’

‘Of course,’ I mumble, momentarily winded by his words. Little does Kit realise how much of a gut-punch it is to hear how cherished Tui is by her mother – by the same mother who felt unable to cherish me. Unable or unwilling – I don’t yet know which. But I find that I cannot resent Tui, even if I am a bit jealous of her. Because how could I? She absolutely deserves all this abundant love that everybody seems to shower her with – Bonnie’s most of all.

I look down at my napkin, which I have begun shredding into pieces in my hands, then back out across the water. Now that Tui has ceased lobbing her stones in favour of hunting for shells, the surface of the lake has returned to a glassy calm.

‘Time to get back on the road, kids,’ Griff says, stretching out each of his arms like a scarecrow. His eyebrows are so pale that the sunlight makes them appear translucent.