After everyone left for the school run, Lou didn’t make any attempt to go inside, so I made another round of coffee and tried very hard not to imagine how she’d spent the previous few days in an empty house. Then, because I couldn’t think of what else to do, I went into the shed and got a couple of the letters and the new foolscap notepad I’d swiped from Dom’s desk. Then I sat down in my chair a few feet from my sister and waited patiently for the miracle of insight to drop in.

But the bravado of those first answers I’d banged out seemed to have completely dissipated with the uncomfortable realisation that had arrived over egg and chips. Which was that for most of these people this wasn’t a joke, or something to be made light of. They were genuinely looking for something. Help. From me, the guy who couldn’t even hold down a job in a call centre.

‘Best job ever.’

‘What?’ I jumped at Lou’s voice, splashing coffee on to the letters in my lap.

‘Sorry. What we . . . what you asked me before, about my job. I’m just saying I think it’s the best job in the world.’

‘Oh, right, yeah. Yeah?’

‘Well, it’s terrible pay, long hours and pretty hard on the heart some days, but when I can get someone a proper, permanent roof over their head, sometimes for the first time in years, it really is something else. Just . . . just to know you’ve given someone a leg-up, you know? A second chance to get it right.’ She stared into the shed and I wished I’d pulled the door shut.

Second chances, now there was a thing.

‘Dad told me something once, when I’d just started my course at uni. He said that all anyone really needs is a leg-up, because the ladder’s always waiting there.’ Lou’s voice was still very quiet but it had lost some of its hollowness, and I thought maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d benefitted from a bit of fresh air. ‘I don’t think I properly understood what he meant until I saw how little it takes to make a massive difference in someone’s life.’

She didn’t say anything else and when I snuck a look, she had her eyes closed and her face tipped back to the sky. She looked like she was sleeping, but every now and again I saw her head move ever so slightly in my direction, like she was checking I was there. And the funny thing is, I was.

I shuffled the papers on my lap and thought about cats and kings and curly Cs, and my wise old dad who always knew the right thing to say. I doodled stick men and birds and Ray up a tree, and mused on leg-ups and ladders and the best job ever. A sudden breeze lifted the top letter from my lap and it wafted to the ground. I bent down to pick it up, and by the time I sat back I knew something in me had shifted.