‘This is so great, Mum,’ she’d cried for joy as they stepped out onto the balcony of their cabin. The tears in Lisa’s eyes may have been stirred by the wind blowing up to deck 5 from the port, but Julia preferred to believe that it was Lisa’s delight at the gigantic cruise ship and the luxurious outside cabin which would be home for the next seven days. And they had one each.

In her current circumstances, with her income as a nurse and living as a single mum, Julia couldn’t have even afforded an inside cabin on the Sultan of the Seas. But Daniel Bonhoeffer, the captain of the Sultan, had invited her personally. She’d known him for years, almost decades, but she had great difficulty explaining their relationship to outsiders. They weren’t close enough to be considered friends, and yet the ties between their families were too great for them to be called casual acquaintances. Besides, Daniel was Lisa’s godfather. Without this connection she would have lost contact with him long ago, but Daniel had been a kindergarten friend of her husband’s. Julia had never fully understood why her ex had sustained a friendship for so many years with a man who basically was interested in one person only: Daniel Bonhoeffer. Within five minutes he never failed to steer the topic of conversation around to himself. This could occasionally be entertaining when he regaled his listeners with tales about the exotic destinations he sailed to. But, as far as Julia was concerned, it certainly wasn’t enough to constitute a reciprocal friendship. In any case he always gave her the impression that his politeness was put on, and that he simply told other people what they wanted to hear. Each time she met him she felt as if she’d been to a fast food joint. Everything was okay, basically, but a strange feeling lingered in your stomach.

Now that she was on his ship for the first time, however, she wondered whether she hadn’t been judging Daniel too harshly. After all, once again he’d proven how highly he worshipped his goddaughter. Every year Lisa got a huge birthday present; this time it had been the transatlantic crossing to New York. ‘Thank your godfather,’ Julia had said when Lisa fell into her arms on the balcony. Her daughter had smelled of tobacco and her pale make-up had rubbed off on Julia’s cheek, but she’d been as little bothered by this as by the studded collar pressing into her face. The only thing that mattered to Julia at that moment was the fact that she was finally holding her daughter in her arms again. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt so close to her little girl.

‘It’s an absolute dream here,’ she told Tom.