‘Jeez, girl!’ he said, pushing at my shoulder. ‘You’re a right romance killer. Okay, Mrs Pedant, we’ll put them on the windowsill in the bedroom.’ He took hold of my hand and put the pebbles into it, then he closed my fingers round them and clenched my hand with his. ‘And in years to come …’ I looked at him. He looked into my eyes: that sensation, I hadn’t felt it in a while, the feeling that my lungs had become shallow. ‘In years to come, Lisa Evans, we will look at Lisa Pebble and Matthew Pebble next to each other, and maybe there’ll be some little Baby Pebbles next to them, and we’ll remember our walk along the river, and even if you’re being a right pain in the arse and really getting on my nerves at that particular moment, they will make us feel happy.’

He removed his hand. I opened mine. The two pebbles lay on my palm. They were quite ordinary pebbles, brown and grey, one larger than the other and kidney-shaped, the other a smoother, flatter oval. ‘Am I the fat one or the thin one?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Come on, Grandma!’ He leapt to his feet and held out his hand to pull me up. I slipped the pebbles into the side pocket of my bag.

*

On our way back home, we took a detour to cross the park. The sun had dimmed, the way it can in winter, even on a cloudless day, and there was only one family in the children’s play area – a dad with two children. They left as we approached.

‘Fantastic!’ exclaimed Matty. ‘Let’s go on the swings. Come on, Evans!’ he said. ‘Let’s see how high you can go!’ He ran up to them and jumped onto one, pushing off immediately with his long legs. ‘Bet I can go higher!’

He won easily of course, not just because of his greater strength – the chains of the swings were shortened to discourage teenagers from monopolising them – but because of his recklessness, throwing his body back and forward from one perilous horizontal to another, making the swing seat jump and judder.

‘Come on,’ he shouted gleefully, ‘that’s pathetic! Throw yourself into it, what are you afraid of?’

Perhaps it was because he called me pathetic – or perhaps it was simply the turn of phrase, the one he had used in our bathroom discussion, what are you afraid of? Whatever the reason, I kept a laugh in my voice as I responded; it was banter, I swear, I wasn’t trying to provoke him – or at least, that’s what I thought at the time.

‘What am I afraid of? Well I’m more afraid of you and Jasmine than I am of swinging high!’