‘Hi. Yeah, no. Only me.’

I stood up and straight away her eyes flicked down to the new armchair. I calculated the ridiculously small number of steps between me and the safety of my shed, but it was too late, she’d already started hobbling across the patio. When she reached the chair and made to sit down, I had no choice but to help her. I took both the crutches in one hand and wrapped the other around the top of her arm to steady her. I searched my brain for something light to fill the gap – a joke about gardens, a quip about chairs, a pun about families – but I found nothing, and the moment passed. Lou rubbed her hands over the threadbare velvet fabric.

‘It’s brilliant. You didn’t steal it, did you?’

‘I don’t think so, but you never know with Ray.’ She smiled, then immediately ducked her head, and it crossed my mind she might have thought I’d rescued it especially for her. Had I? The thought made me nervous.

‘So . . . um, coffee?’

Lou gazed through the open door of my shed for what seemed like a long time and she wasn’t even looking at me when she answered, very softly.

‘I’ve missed you, Danny. Cappuccino, please.’

Before I had time to collapse and die on the spot, the back door swung open and Dom came out, showered, shiny, and smelling like expensive aftershave. He took in the presence of the second armchair and raised his eyebrows in mock, or possibly real, horror.

‘Good God, they’re breeding. And before you say anything, I don’t want to know.’ He shook his head good-naturedly. ‘Morning, Lou.’

His eyes flicked between Lou and me a couple of times and a shadow of something hovered across his face. Then it was gone and he turned to go back inside. ‘Come on, what’s happening with the coffee, you slacker?’

I followed him in, wondering what that look had been. Surprise? Smugness? A smirk? All three? It was impossible to tell. Maybe he was just enjoying the symmetry of it all.

That morning, my sister and I sat in opposing armchairs on the patio like a couple of lost pawns on a chessboard. Lou hadn’t moved since she’d first sat down, which had considerably narrowed my options: I could blatantly leg it out of the side gate right in front of her, I could hole up in my shed, also literally right in front of her, or I could choose to be a grown-up. It was a tough decision.

We managed the smallest of small talk while we drank our coffee and caught jealous snatches of the much less stilted conversations going on in the kitchen. After the topic of the half-dug veggie patch ran its (very short) course, in a moment of genius I asked Lou about her job, which took the heat off me. She started to explain what a community resettlement worker actually did, but was interrupted when George charged out in his pants to give the new chair his seal of approval, and again when Wolfie came to the back door to say hello (and, by the look she gave me, to check that I was ‘going easy’ enough on her mother).