‘You’re ready?’ Craig repeated with such blistering sarcasm that Frankie half-expected the paint to start peeling from the walls. ‘You’re ready to pick up where you left off.’ He shook his head, incredulous, before rounding on her. ‘You can’t do that with a child, Julia. It doesn’t work like that, you can’t just press pause and then play when you feel like it. Because, tell me: where were you when he was having surgery, when he was teething, when he was ill, tired, upset, scared? On his birthday, at Christmas, when he took his first steps? Why weren’t you ready for your own son four years ago?’

Frankie flinched at the bitter fury in his voice. His words came out so fluently, so vehemently, she had the feeling they had been rehearsed many times in his head before. Craig had always been rather tight-lipped about Julia in the past, intimating that he had cut her completely out of his thoughts, detaching her from his life like a broken old piece of furniture. Frankie hadn’t realized just how much hurt and rage were still seething volcanically away inside. ‘Craig,’ she said timidly, because she couldn’t bear to see him like this. And actually if Julia had been ill and suffered some kind of breakdown, then he should cut her some slack. You could hardly blame a person for that.

‘What?’ he retorted, his face contorted with anger. ‘She wants to take Fergus away. What part of that don’t you understand?’

The words were like a slap. ‘Take him away?’ Frankie repeated in horror, turning to Julia. ‘But I thought . . .’ She’d assumed – perhaps naively – that Julia merely wanted to spend a bit of time with him. Start a new relationship. Maybe have him for the occasional afternoon here or there, building up to a night. A weekend. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? Seeing as she was his mother and all? Nobody could deny her that much, surely. But to take Fergus completely away – to rip him from Frankie and Craig, from this flat, their bedtime routines and favourite play parks and silly family jokes – no. No. This could not possibly be an option. No!

‘He’s my son,’ said Julia, playing her trump card. The card that could not be denied or beaten; not by Frankie anyway, she thought helplessly.

Shock and fear flooded her system. Her heart contracted painfully, as if there was too much to process; it felt hard to breathe. Was this what happened when you meddled with other people’s families – that someone turned up, days later, to meddle in yours? It was as if, by going up to York to investigate her own parentage, she’d somehow let loose some celestial mischief that was now set to wreak havoc in Frankie’s own small world, to put in jeopardy everything she loved.