Meanwhile, Paula was peeling potatoes for a roast dinner, her head in a spin. A sister, she kept thinking. A half-sister who’d existed all this time, completely unknown to the rest of the family. What was her agenda? Had she grown up feeling resentful of Dad? What did she even look like? Her fingers shook and a wet potato slid from her hand, bouncing to the floor, where Oscar, her wire-haired dachshund, made an immediate dash for it. ‘No!’ Paula admonished him, but her voice cracked on the word and she found herself sliding to a kneeling position on the lino and bursting into tears. She didn’t want this to be happening! She wanted it all to be unsaid, undone, for life to go back to the way it was before today. ‘Oh, Oscar,’ she wept, as he lost interest in the potato and pushed his nose against her arm in a show of canine sympathy. ‘What are we going to do?’

On the other side of town, Dave kept staring into space, seemingly miles away, occasionally raking a bewildered hand through his hair. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he murmured now and then. ‘I just can’t believe it.’ Bunny knew what a person in trauma looked like. She steered him to the sofa, tuned the radio to the soothing burble of cricket commentary and found him a beer. ‘Don’t worry,’ she kept saying in her calmest voice. ‘Everyone will get over this. Everything will work itself out.’

John, too, was struggling with the situation. Once Robyn and the children had returned from her mum’s, he’d given her the bare bones of the story, but then closed down under questioning, telling her he didn’t want to talk about it any more. His phone kept ringing, but he sent the calls to voicemail, his face locked in an unreadable expression. It was like having a wounded lion pacing about the house, snapping at the children for bickering with each other, snarling at any attempted small talk. Robyn couldn’t help a disloyal sigh of relief when he eventually took himself off for a long run.

It was only once he’d gone that Robyn realized just how shocked and upset she was herself by the whole drama. Harry and Jeanie were the central dynamo of the Mortimer engine, solid and dependable, powering everyone else. With their relationship now seizing and faltering, what would it mean for the rest of the family?