‘No,’ I say. After a moment I pull myself together. ‘Good thinking, if you’re selling the house. Might put potential buyers off, if they’d… you know, heard what happened.’

The fence and the gate have gone, and there’s a flat, muddy patch where the pond used to be. The tyre tracks where a digger has driven over the lawn have sprouted a fine film of new grass.

‘Should have done it a long time ago. But the pond reminded me of your mother and the paintings she loved to do. Mind if we sit, for a minute?’ His breath rattles in his throat.

I help Dad across the uneven ground to a garden table and wooden seats beneath one of the old perry pear trees. I’m on to the second can of cider and my breath hangs in front of me like a small white soul. A barn owl swoops low across the grass, a soft shadow with a heart-shaped face.

The past few months have been difficult, to put it mildly. Matt and Amy reassured me that I had done the right thing by telling them about Bethany and what had really happened but, of course, it brought it up for everyone, just after we’d achieved some sort of fragile equilibrium. I never told them about Luca’s part in it. That’s up to him. He’s already given up a lot, but it was more that I didn’t want Lotte and Theo to grow up thinking that those you love the most aren’t who you think they are; that one day a gentle young man might try and kill you.

I feel as if I’ve lost my sister as well as my niece. None of us have heard from Bethany. I realize, now that she’s gone, we made a lot of assumptions about her. My sister’s life was so public that if we wanted to know how she was, we never asked her, we simply looked at her Instagram account, or her Facebook page, or watched her on TV. None of that exists now; her phone, her email, her website – it’s all disappeared. And obviously those stories never told the truth.

I don’t know how to think about Bethany any more: I hate her, but I miss her. I know she was selfish and self-absorbed and shouldn’t have left Ruby-May on her own, but I wonder whether, if it had been me, I’d have behaved any differently. We Flowers are all alike, or at least Bethany and I are more similar than I would have admitted before. Cut from the same cloth, all that crap.

‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ my father says suddenly.

‘Hey, are you cold? Maybe we should go in. Or go up to the pub. I could get a blanket…’