Because no matter how many times I told myself my mother’s death was nobody’s fault, that the crash that killed her was entirely down to bad weather and bad luck, the nasty little ever-present voice at my shoulder disagreed.

Whenever I saw Lou coming towards me, I’d move away or change direction, so the hand that always seemed to be reaching for mine would miss. Sometimes I’d feel a brush as I veered left or right, and I’d feel a pang of guilt that I became very good at ignoring.

‘Danny, Danny, wait for me.’

I’d pretend not to hear as I jogged out of the door and up the street to nowhere without looking back. Sometimes she followed, but I knew when she got to the corner she’d stop and watch me until I disappeared before walking the twenty metres back home. Because no going past the corner was the rule and – to her downfall – for all that guts and determination, Lou played by the rules.

But while I spent all those years dodging her, Lou grew up anyway. She was eighteen and living away from home at university in Bath when Dad died. I hadn’t seen her for about five months, because whenever she’d come home to visit I always made sure I was too busy with my own life – drinking and smoking as much as I could, and working at various part-time jobs as little as I could – to make time to come the ten minutes down the road from my flat-share to Dad’s for a family dinner.

When I did see her, the day before Dad’s funeral, which we (mainly she) had organised sadly and awkwardly by phone, I remember being surprised at how much she’d changed in those few months. Her face was thinner and much more like my mother’s than I’d remembered, and I thought, How dare you, before realising it had probably happened a long time before that and I just hadn’t been looking.

I’m not using any of that stuff as an excuse for what happened, but everyone has their Waterloo and I’m ashamed to say I met mine in spectacular form at my father’s final send-off. After ten years of holding something so shameful in so tight, so carefully, it was probably always doomed to explode like a drum full of pigeons on that very shitty day, with way too many beers under my belt and the stars precisely aligned. What I’m saying is that it wasn’t premeditated. But then the best disasters rarely are.

Lou got to the wake late because she’d had to stay back and take care of the cash donation to the minister, something I’d completely overlooked, of course. When she walked into the old man’s bar at my father’s local, I was talking to his sweet ninety-five-year-old neighbour, and Lou came straight over and stood at my elbow, very close. It was probably pure habit that made me deliberately lean away from her and into the familiar feeling of annoyance that welled in my guts. But I was already four pints to the wind and decisions were starting to make themselves.