The station I got off at was deep in the Devon countryside, the platform dark and deserted. I pulled my ugly, warm coat a little tighter around my body, remembering Amber’s airy suggestion that I just ‘grab a cab’ when I arrived. I headed for the ticket office, but it was shuttered closed, and the tiny car park was a ghostly garage, no cab rank in sight. Something stopped me from simply calling her, demanding help as part of the pricy package I’d paid for. Now I marvel at how much I was prepared to put up with in order to kid myself that I was a friend or an equal, something more to her than a mere client.

After some frantic googling I found a firm who promised a cab in half an hour. I shivered on a bench inside the tiny entrance hall, my hands plunged deep in my pockets. Eventually a battered Vauxhall Astra pulled up, the cheery driver heaving my case into the boot. ‘Last Christmas’ blared from his radio, approximately the nine millionth time I’d heard it that month. The cab smelt of fags, a tinsel tree swinging jauntily from his mirror while the heater blasted out noisy air.

‘So, you’re going to Holcroft, are you?’ he asked as I swung the seatbelt across my swaddled body.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Buckle up, then,’ he said, laughing to himself. ‘Your family rented it for Christmas?’

‘Yeah, they have,’ I said merrily. Lying still came so easily. And besides, Amber sort of was family in my mind. ‘We’ve been planning it for ages. What are you up to?’

As his car zoomed down pitch-black lanes as narrow as spaghetti, twisting and turning around hairpin bends, ‘Gavin’ gave me the full rundown. His daughter had got divorced, taken up with a fella he didn’t think much of, but he was at least getting to spend Christmas with his two angelic granddaughters. His wife had died two years ago, and Christmas made the loss particularly savage, but he knew she was watching over them all, giving him marks out of ten for his gravy. I sat there, letting his monologue wash over me: I couldn’t imagine my dad ever talking about us with the same easy warmth. Sometimes it felt more like we were prizes than offspring, and I was definitely the booby of the bunch. Waves of nausea got progressively worse as the journey refused to end, but eventually we drew up to a pair of high, wrought-iron gates. Gavin leant out of his rolled-down window and pressed the buzzer, the gates parting slowly like the wings of a bird of prey, to reveal a forbidding grey pile.

‘Wow,’ I said.