Katrina was a bright child and was able to follow this statement to its logical conclusion: her own birth, too, was a mistake. She felt guilty for the difficulties they’d all caused her mother.

Katrina’s father finally left when she was ten years old, not long after Jill had packed up and gone to Edinburgh. Katrina simply came down to breakfast one day to find him gone. The household had halved in a matter of months. Katrina had been more upset when Jill left, though she would not miss the rows Jill had had with their mother towards the end.

Katrina was surprised at how distraught her mother was at her father’s departure, given that Katrina had come to think of him by then as their enemy. She thought the house would be more peaceful without him. Maybe now she would be able to sit quietly and do her homework without being frightened by the sudden sound of yelling or doors slamming downstairs. Still, Katrina would sometimes lie awake at night in the aftermath (in fact, this would go on for years) and think about the fact that her own father hadn’t liked her enough to stick around. He had stayed for Jill, it seemed, but not for her.

Her mother took to her bed for three days and refused to get up. “He was my whole life,” she said over and over again. Katrina hadn’t been to school that week, because her mother said she couldn’t bear to be left alone. Katrina sat for hours on end in the dark, stuffy bedroom while her mother cried and talked about betrayal. They were running low on food by the third day, and Katrina had resorted to feeding herself and her mother peanut butter on toast for every meal. She wasn’t sure what they would do when the bread from the freezer ran out, and she was starting to feel very anxious about it.

She slept late on the fourth day, exhausted by it all, and when she got up and shuffled into her mother’s bedroom in her nightdress, she found her mother gone. Katrina momentarily panicked, believing in that moment that her mother had left as well, but then she heard her mother’s voice from downstairs, calling, “Katrina, come and have your breakfast.”

In the kitchen, her mother had set out two plates, and next to each one was a glass of orange juice. Katrina could immediately see it was the expensive kind with bits, which she was never usually allowed. Her mother was cooking eggs and bacon in a frying pan and heating up baked beans in a saucepan. There was already toast in the toast rack and a new pat of butter on the table. Katrina, still half asleep, wondered where all this food had come from, and then, with even more confusion, where her mother’s good mood had come from.