‘Danny drinks loads of beer and lives in our garden shed.’ Brilliant. ‘Also, he swears a lot, he hasn’t got a job, and he got his picture in the paper for being rude.’

Couldn’t argue with that. Didn’t even try.

After a while, Dom tactfully steered the conversation away from me (and let’s face it, George had pretty much covered that topic) and on to birds of the Cornwall coast, George’s latest school project. It sent him off on a ten-minute trajectory and even though Lou didn’t contribute, I could see she was listening intently to every word he said. When he turned to include her in some fact about a crow or a kestrel, she mustered a smile but it didn’t look like it came easy.

Wolfie was up and down several times, fussing over Lou, topping up her tea and, once, clumsily plumping a cushion behind her. When Lou leaned forward on the sofa, I saw an odd look pass between them, which was both tender and angry, and I wondered if it had anything to do with me.

I let the tea and conversation wash over me and thought, How strange this is. To be here in this room so close to my sister I could actually reach out and touch her, after a lifetime apart. Literally, her daughter’s entire lifetime. My eyes fell on a pair of rust-stained sneakers, toes pointed to the wall, laces trailing. It looked like someone had just stepped out of them and walked through the open window. With a jolt I recalled Lou’s bare toes at the end of the gauze bandages and it felt like I’d seen something very private.

I tried to look away, but the sneakers looked back, daring me to remember a small girl with scratched shins and laces always undone. Scraped knuckles holding the bottom of a stretched-out T-shirt overflowing with shrivelled new Devon apples. Danny, Danny, come and see what I’ve got! A girl who looked to me for everything, but wasn’t afraid of anything.

I continued to smile and swallow tea and I even managed a few sentences when prompted by Dom, but my head was a disaster of half-formed memories and snippets of conversations, like random guilty eavesdropping. And the thing is, I really could have seen it coming, what happened. I didn’t, though. Not when Dom stood up from his chair and walked over to the sofa, and not when he gathered up Lou’s folded tower of washing and placed it on the floor. I didn’t even twig when he sat down next to her and put his smooth, capable surgeon’s hand on her plastered leg. It wasn’t until he started to talk in that calm, reassuring way of his that I got an inkling, which turned into a rush of realisation that came way too late to try and stop him. And even though I knew the most decent bloke in the world always says what he means and means what he says, I still uselessly willed him not to. Because by then I knew exactly what he was going to do.