He’d phoned the electricity company, gas, but they wouldn’t pass on the details. Phoned Italy, where Nonna had refused to say anything. ‘And I tried your new school. Two or three times. I reckon your mamma put out a few horror stories about me. I don’t know what, but the secretary was as helpful as the bloody secret service. Shut me down. Just as bad in the flesh, as I recall.’

‘You were there?’

‘I was.’ He talked of coming to London, months later – after Rosa and Matty had moved from Golders Green. No forwarding addresses. Flying out to Italy, before they had gone out to live down the coast from Nonna and Nonno.

It was a new story. Not the one that Matty had carried for fourteen years, nor the one since finding the note in Rosa’s loft. An entirely new one.

‘I went to the hotel, but Johanna’s folks said they didn’t know where you’d gone to. I tried to talk to the secretary at St George’s, like I said, and was told they’d call the police. Hung around instead outside the gates, feeling like a bloody flasher-in-waiting. But I didn’t see you.’

‘I went to a different school once we moved.’

Joe put his head down. A long, quiet sigh.

There was an unspeakable emptiness in Matty’s stomach. The lengths that Rosa had gone to to hide them. It had been calculated.

‘I should have done more,’ Joe said, to the kitchen counter. ‘I know I should have. I should have held your grandparents hostage until they spilled it. I just – I never wanted to hurt anyone. I thought about a private detective, even, but that seemed ridiculous. And Rosa – I did get her on the phone once, early on. I don’t know if you were there, but she said you weren’t. She said …’ He glanced up only briefly. ‘She said you didn’t want to see me ever again.’ He shook his head. ‘I’d half a mind for it not to be true, but—’ He stopped and gazed out of the window at the rain.

It seemed as if he might leave it there, not say another word. But he seemed to galvanise himself. ‘Matty, I hated myself. Hated myself for what Rosa was doing to me, for not managing it. For finding that I liked – that I was attracted to a man, to men, for leaving. After a while, I tried to face up to it. That you hated me.’

‘Why would you have thought that? How could you believe I wouldn’t want to see you?’

‘Because I was ashamed. Of what I was. What I am.’

‘You should have told me.’ Their cups of coffee were both cold, and Joe had got up, moving gingerly as if he had an injury, to put the kettle on again.

‘Which part? About being – about falling in love with a man?’