‘Rosie,’ Cathy says. Her father stops walking and nods. ‘You never usually do anything in the week of her birthday,’ she adds softly.

‘Your mum doesn’t,’ he says simply. Something slots into place for Cathy. Maybe now because she’s seeing Tom, she has a different perspective, a relationship perspective. Her mother is the one driving their behaviour, the anxiety, the reclusiveness, maybe. Her father puts up a front to avoid revealing that.

‘I see,’ Cathy says. ‘Well, we all … we’re all flawed, aren’t we?’ she says, thinking whether she deserved those perfunctory birthday presents, the lack of joy, the shortage of love. Thinking about whether anything can be done now to undo it.

‘We are,’ her father says, and his hand trails softly down her arm to grip her hand. He squeezes gently. ‘Your mother is. I am.’

‘What about me?’ she says.

‘You’re perfect,’ he whispers. His eyes dart to the house. He grasps Cathy’s hand tighter and pulls her in for a hug. ‘She would have been thirty this year,’ he whispers in Cathy’s ear.

‘I know,’ she says. The quiet and dark of the garden, lit only by the reflections of lights from the house, makes the conversation easier. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You don’t need to be,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to be.’

‘But I do,’ she says to him. ‘We never – we never discussed it.’

‘We don’t need to,’ he says.

‘I think we did,’ Cathy says to him. He turns his mouth down in a show of what might be agreement or ambivalence. It’s not perfect, but it is something. Cathy nods, releases his hand and walks towards the house. It’s the best she will get.

As she leaves him downstairs, she hears him call up to her. ‘Have a look in the trunk,’ he says. She knows exactly where he means.

She walks upstairs, alone. Owen and Maria have kept each of their children’s bedrooms almost exactly as they were when they left. This is more her mother’s impulse than her father’s. She cleans the rooms each week, irrespective of guests, like a well-kept museum.

Cathy’s room is the last, the door at the very end of a long corridor with wooden, uneven floors. She creaks it open. The bedroom is cold in that way of unoccupied rooms, and she reaches down by the bed to turn on the old brass radiator, the metal tap cool under her fingers. She used to tuck the duvet behind this radiator and lie right next to it when she was a child, her legs slowly cooking.

Somebody has left a pair of folded pyjamas on the trunk. Cathy rubs the soft material. They’re an old pair of hers. She must have left them here ages ago. She moves them and opens it, a kind of ottoman, with a creak. Inside is a box. On it is her name, written in calligraphy-style print. She opens that, and finds all her old school reports, a few Babygros, a few photographs of the four of them, and a few of just her too. One of her having dropped an ice-cream, a shocked expression on her face. One of her and Rosie wading in a lake – something their mother would never have let Cathy do after Rosie died. She closes the box after a few minutes and sits with the notion that her mother cares enough to at least keep hold of this stuff, even if she created it before Cathy’s mistake.