The door opens now: Casey’s dressed and ready. ‘Dad, get up. Can we go to BayCaff, please?’

We’re the first customers. The barista greets her by name, and she grins. She’s grinning at everything this morning. We settle in our favourite spot on the deck, and the chef brings us our brunches: Mexican eggs, the skillets sizzling and the peppers smoking.

‘You look happy,’ I say once he’s gone.

‘I am so happy my face hurts. I must have been smiling in my sleep.’

‘What about?’

‘Yesterday,’ she says, blowing on the forkful of hot cheese and egg, before putting it into her mouth and sighing with pleasure.

‘Anything in particular?’

‘The baby, and the diner, and Gemma’s dad’s awful jokes. And throwing the ball. Oh,’ Casey gives me a slightly secretive glance, ‘and the tarot too.’

I wasn’t sure about letting her see Mystic Debs. ‘You know it’s trickery?’

‘That’s what everyone said. But, Dad, she saw so much about me.’

‘About the future?’

‘No. She was very strict about that, said she can’t tell the future. Which I said was good, because I don’t even know if I have one.’ She stops, sees my shocked face, laughs. ‘Joke! No, Debs said tarot is about making sense of the present, and where your head’s at.’

Perhaps I should go and see Debs myself. ‘OK. So what happened?’

‘I got to choose a tarot deck – one with animals on it – and I had to think of a question to ask the cards as I shuffled them.’

‘What question did you ask?’

She blushes. ‘That’s private. But I had loads. Debs got me to pick three cards. The first one was the Queen of Wands, this cat in a red-and-orange dress. Her face was like Gemma’s – if Gemma was a cat. The second one had two hugging otters, and that was called The Lovers.’

‘Please tell me you don’t think that’s you and Harrison?’

‘Da-ad. He’s a friend. The third one was creepy. It showed a rabbit in a bow tie hanging upside down and the caption read: The Hanged Man.’

‘That’s not on. A grown woman should know better than to show that kind of image to a child.’

Casey shakes her head. ‘Well, a: I’m not a child; and b: Debs says that card’s not about hanging or dying – it’s about surviving something. Like my treatment? So what you do is put the cards together so they make a story, and mine is about inner strength and about Team Casey. The people who’re getting me through.’

I’m pleased she wasn’t freaked out, but this stuff sounds about as mystical as one of my father’s cons.

‘Then when I came out of the little booth, the first person I saw was Gemma. In her red-and-orange dress. And then a bit later I . . . I saw you two together, and I got all the feels and I thought: you could be the lovers.’ She blushes. ‘I mean, boyfriend and girlfriend. Maybe?’