‘I love you!’ shouts Dad. ‘I love you, Prue!’

‘I love you too, Dad,’ I call, and in the cold and the dark, through arches seven, eight, nine, my dread heart is pierced by a sliver of light. There’s no cost, I think. There’s no cost to the secrets Dad and I hid but have now revealed. A conduit of relief rises from me like ether as I reach arch ten and surges from me, to the domed ceiling I know is above, and fills a gap in my heart, making me feel freer than I have in a long time. Dad loves me. I could see it on his face, on the street outside The Palladian. I saw it in his expression, on Albert Bridge. I’ve seen it in all the places we’ve been in London this summer and I’ve known it every day of my life – it’s just that, for a long time, I stopped noticing what he stopped being able to make visible. My Dad loves me, as much as he always has. I am still that little girl in the photos, the one at the rock pool and outside Nonna and Papa’s gelato parlour. I am still that girl on my father’s knee, one of Neptune’s little fishes – held and hugged tight, the girl who had her face wiped with the enormous hanky. He still loves me, and it took one summer in London to show me.

Arch thirteen.

‘Are you OK?’ A very faint shout.

‘Yes, Dad!’

‘Are you scared?’

‘No, I’m not scared!’

‘Good! Just keep going!’

Arch fifteen. I am scared; of course I am. Scared for Kemp, scared I’ll never make it out of here. I’ve always been scared, as a default. As a child, as a teenager, as an adult. I haven’t had Angela’s front. Angela’s breezy confidence in herself and the world around her. Angela wouldn’t be scared. She’d probably be marching through here in a pair of her high heels, dictating a luxury shopping list to herself. She said she misses me. I know I miss her. Can we get back what we had, as kids? When we were Roo and Angela (Pangela), the sisters who laughed and loved together? Maybe. Maybe we can. There are things I need to say to her. Things I need to tell her. Including telling her Mum is here in London and that she is clean and came looking for us all those years ago. That she is going to call her, so Angela can make her decision: if she wants to love Mum after all this time and allow Mum the chance to love her.