She looks at me, her gaze even and steady. Her eyes are exactly the same colour as mine. ‘I came to see you both, one evening, in the summer of nineteen ninety-six. Neither of you were there so I went next door, to the Chinese takeaway. I saw a girl there, she was about your age – I mean the age you would have been at the time. She was behind the counter, reading the newspaper. I asked if she knew you and I asked her where you were – you and Angela. She told me Angela had moved to Canada and you were working in Spain.’

Cherry Lau, I think. It was Cherry that she saw. I’d been in the week before Tenerife, I expect, for Dad’s Singapore noodles, and had probably mumbled something about my trip in one of our awkward conversations. And I bet it wasn’t a newspaper, I bet it was Cosmopolitan.

‘Both girls living abroad!’ continues Ellen. ‘I was a little surprised you’d left your father, but he had the guide dogs and, knowing Vince, he’d encouraged you both to be go-getters, to make something of yourselves—’

‘Dad didn’t have the guide dogs then,’ I say flatly. ‘He became allergic to them. He said goodbye to the last one in nineteen ninety, a few months before you came to see Angela that time. You know, the time you called her a bitch.’

She looks like I have just slapped her. ‘Yes, I did. Fuck, that was awful!’ Her hand is over her mouth but something about that ‘Fuck’ makes me think that in another life I could warm to her, just a little. ‘I didn’t realize about the dogs, but I wasn’t capable of realizing much, at that time. I—’

‘And I wasn’t living abroad. I’d gone to Tenerife for a week, for work.’

‘Oh. The girl said you were working in Spain. Well, that was a huge misunderstanding,’ she says. She looks quite shocked. What exactly had Cherry Lau said? I wondered. Had she misunderstood what I’d said, in one of our usual half-listened to, excruciating exchanges, or had she been deliberately ambiguous? ‘I immediately thought I’d lost both of you, then, that it was too late. I thought you’d both literally gone places. I was clean then, you know. I had been clean, actually, since the early nineties. After I’d seen Angela that time … Well, I knew I had to stop. I went to France for a few years. To a kind of retreat, a commune. I sorted myself out, with help. Then I moved back. I felt I didn’t deserve to ever see either of you again – I was frightened to, to be honest, but in nineteen ninety-six, I came.’

‘So you never went to Sweden, but you went to France,’ I say.

‘Yes.’