She finishes reading and looks at me expectantly, her eyes once again slick with tears. I hear murmurs from the assembled people, blown away by my parents’ generosity, no doubt.

“I don’t know what to say,” I say, feeling very much on the verge of an emotional breakdown. “Thank you. It’s amazing and very unexpected.”

“Yes, well, luckily your father managed to keep one secret for a change. And you’re welcome.” She steps forward to embrace me and beckons my father in on the embrace. For a moment I allow myself to relax and just enjoy the feel of their arms around me, so comfortably reassuring, and I breathe in the familiar smell that is the backbone of my childhood, my memories, my life. The panic swells again. How am I supposed to tell them?

“I need the loo,” I say, ducking out of their arms.

“Are you OK?” Mum calls after me.

But I can’t answer.

Instead of turning right at the end of the hallway into the toilet, I open the familiar door on the left and tumble into my childhood bedroom. Closing the door behind me and leaning against it, I squeeze my eyes shut and breathe in and out until I feel my pulse slow down and the panic retreat. I reach out in the familiar darkness and flick the bedside lamp on. Instantly the room is cast in a warm, welcoming glow. It’s only here, in the silence away from the chatter of the party, that I realize it has started to rain outside, the sound loud on the iron roof.

My room is the same as the day I left it. Well, that’s not strictly true. When I’d left, seven years ago, I’d been giddy with newfound independence and freedom and I packed in a hurry, throwing anything I thought I might need into a bin bag and leaving the rest lying around like hurricane debris. My mother has been through and tidied, most likely seizing the opportunity to throw a few things out.

Lowering myself gently down onto the end of the bed, I look around, feeling a mixture of emotions. I grew up in this room. My parents bought the house before I was born, and even though I’ve lived under a few roofs since, this is the only one that has ever really felt like home.

I reach out to run a hand along the smooth wooden walls behind my bed. I can tell you exactly how many knots in the wood there are in my room (487), and which boards creak in the heat of the afternoon sun, and which ones constrict noisily in protest when it’s winter and the air outside is cold. The stain is still on the carpet from where I spilled my pink nail polish when I was twelve and getting ready for my first disco, and there is the tiniest crack in the corner of the window from where I threw my shoe at it in frustration when I was sixteen and grounded, for a reason that seemed devastatingly unfair at the time and something I’d never get over but is nothing but a foggy memory now.