‘When it was just me and Mum, most of the time I’d play by myself because she’d usually end up going back to bed for half the day. This one time, I must have got bored or hungry or something and I went to find her. She was lying out in the garden on a towel, with her eyes closed, but I could tell she wasn’t asleep. I stood there not saying anything, and after a while she opened her eyes and told me to run along. I was about to do what I was told, but then you know what she said?’ I shook my head, or I think I did.

‘That she’d tried. “I’ve tried with you, Lou,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to have to try so hard all the time.” I didn’t have a clue what she meant, so I just ran along. But I didn’t ever forget it and I don’t know how much later it was, but after a long time of thinking about it, one day I just woke up and realised exactly what she’d meant. And I remember feeling really bad for her, because of how hard it must have been for her to have to try to love me, when she already had you.’ Me and my lovely mother. Shoo now, Lou.

‘It wasn’t until Wolfie was born that I really started to think about it again, though. Because the minute I held my own daughter, I knew that was it. Forget about a career, forget about Larry, Dad dying, you – I knew nothing mattered as much as protecting that precious little human. And the more I fell in love with Wolfie, the more it made me think about Mum. Not about the accident, and how sad it was to grow up without a mother, but about that day she told me how hard it was to love me. Because when I looked at my daughter, it felt like my heart was going to blow up my chest and I’d think, how could loving a little kid ever be hard? How bad must I have been?’

I thought about the safe place I’d always found on my mother’s lap and what it would have been like not to have had that. Not to be told every day you were the best and the brightest, not to feel loved by that strong, funny, wonderful woman who could do anything, including grow a brand-new baby. (A baby who’d been, I realised with a punch to my gut, just as she’d promised; exactly what everybody needed – except for her.)

I thought about little Lou, who’d lost so much and still followed me around like a shadow, never giving up no matter how many times I pushed her away, ignored her, pretended I was asleep or stayed out until past her bedtime. The girl who’d carried on trying to hold her broken family together, against the odds, even when she was the only one trying. And I thought how easy it was to see now, on the other side of that gulf of wasted years, how unspeakably cruel I’d been.