‘She’s getting so big!’ said Sophie, reaching tentative fingers out to stroke Nancy’s head. I desperately wanted to ask to hold her – this little being whose life I’d been given a role in – but the words choked in my throat.

‘Tell me about it,’ said Chloe, grinning at her. ‘My arms are killing me – do you want to take her?’

No wonder, I thought meanly, when your arms are as thin and brittle as stale Twiglets.

‘Of course I do!’ said Sophie, reaching for the baby. Nancy immediately started to grizzle and twist.

‘Step away from the baby, Sophie. Give her back to Chloe,’ said Josh, striding across the kitchen. ‘We all know you’re trying to practice on her! Where’s my soon-to-be brother-in-law, anyway?’

He walked straight past me, reaching for Nancy as if I wasn’t there. He’d said a clipped hello when he arrived, but he was making his feelings about my behaviour at the christening abundantly clear.

‘He’s working today,’ said Sophie. ‘Gave me a chance to hang out with Rachel.’ She was almost vibrating with her need for us to connect. ‘Coffee, shopping – sister stuff that your inferior male mind couldn’t compute.’

Josh finally deigned to look at me.

‘Hopefully not the Irish kind of coffee,’ he said, smirking. My brother had always been relentlessly cruel. I secretly gripped my crystal.

‘I haven’t drunk for over a month,’ I said. The silence curdled around me. ‘And I want to say – in person, to all of you – how sorry I am about the christening.’

‘Thanks, Rachel,’ said Chloe awkwardly. ‘And thanks for your email, too. We appreciated it.’

‘Guy’s fiancée’s mum’s got cancer!’ said Josh, flushed with self-righteousness, as if I’d personally blown smoke rings into her mum’s face until her lungs had given up the ghost. ‘Trust me, it didn’t exactly help.’

‘Did he tell her?’ I said, heat rising up through my body. How were we having this conversation in everyone’s earshot? How was it that some things in our family could never be spoken of and other things demanded a virtual megaphone? And why was it that I never got to decide which was which?

‘Honesty’s really important to him,’ said Josh. ‘I mean, they are getting married.’

Honesty definitely seemed like one of Guy’s key values, judging by the way he’d dragged me into the toilets without mentioning his betrothed. I risked glancing around the circle of stricken faces. No one else seemed to register this as fake news.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m very sorry, like I said.’

I started to falter. It was repulsive, what I’d done. No wonder they were looking at me with such obvious disgust.