‘I’m sorry,’ I said, the words like glue in my throat. I knew, even in my profound shock, that I had to get us to the end.

‘I tried to kill myself, Rachel,’ she said. ‘That was what my pain drove me to.’ Her gaze settled on me, almost affectionate. ‘You’ll understand that. You came so close to doing yourself serious harm until I intervened.’ Her self belief was cast iron – how stupid I’d been to fall so hard for her. ‘But ultimately it taught me how much I needed to survive. For my child. I needed to build a life for us.’

‘So what did you do?’ I said, my voice a whisper. It was getting harder and harder to endure this.

‘I went to Oxford Poly and did psychology. I waitressed the whole way through to make ends meet.’ She smiled coldly. ‘Unimaginable to a girl like you, I should think.’

Her bitterness towards us was so profound, so far-reaching. How deep had it taken her?

‘And then what happened?’ I said, keeping my voice deliberately gentle. It gave me a horrible feeling of vertigo – me sitting here in this room coaxing and luring out her confessions, the way she had mine for all these months.

‘It took a long time, but I was ready. I was ready to take her back. To tell her the truth. And… all she wanted to do was go to London, just like I had.’ She looked at me. ‘She was still my little girl, even if she didn’t know it consciously.’

Despite everything she’d done, the tragedy at the heart of this story was real.

‘It wasn’t like my mum wanted her to know the truth; she still thought it was some shameful secret.’ Her face looked as though she’d taken a gulp of sour milk. ‘So, I let it happen, I let her go. I kidded myself the shock might be less once she’d lived a bit of life. And then…’

‘And then she came to us,’ I said, the pieces of the story starting to coalesce.

‘She was seventeen, too,’ said Amber, her eyes boring into me. ‘I’ve told you so many times, haven’t I? How history repeats itself in families?’

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice tiny. There was something worse coming – I could sense her closing in on it, my body tingling with a sickening dread.

‘And it did, Rachel,’ she said, almost triumphant. ‘Pregnant by a man more than twice her age who thought she was shit on his shoe.’

The world went dark momentarily, the shock almost forcing me out of my physical form. Again I felt that childish desire to reverse time, to close the lid on a box of horrors I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to stare into.