She goes into the en suite. It’s perfunctory. Just a shower, toilet and sink, but Cathy always liked it. Sometimes, on the bad days after Rosie’s death, she’d pretend this room was a self-contained apartment, one where nobody could come and bother her.

She changes into the pyjamas, putting her clothes in the laundry hamper, like the Plants still do here. Laundry is forever changing hands. Even though they have all left home, none of them quite has altogether, like they are actual plants whose roots still tangle.

And why haven’t they? Cathy swipes off her make-up in the mirror, looking into her own eyes. They are so like Frannie’s. So like Joe’s. So like Rosie’s. The shape, the colour, the size. All identical. She thinks of what her father said. How, twenty years on, she got a grain of truth out of him. How it is so little, so late.

The Plants must seem so functional to outsiders. Cathy finishes taking off her make-up and piles up the dirty cotton balls. They’re covered in the lightest amount of make-up. But we’re not functional, she thinks, as she watches herself emerge, her face red and new-looking from the chemicals, from the wiping.

She stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, thinking about how funny families are. That they are still here, sharing pyjamas, combining their laundry. Regardless of everything. Cathy isn’t sure whether that is a positive or a negative. Isn’t that what families do? Paper over the cracks, still love each other regardless of the black holes trauma leaves in their past? Some of them have tempers, like Joe. Some of them are blissfully unaware, like Frannie. And some of them are like Cathy, cold workaholics, frightened of new experiences. Of any experiences.

After Rosie died, the family seemed to mould itself into new shapes, like clay that had been softened again to make something new. Joe and Frannie joined together. Her parents too, her father in his repression, her mother in her anxiety. And Cathy, culpable Cathy, had been left alone. But had that been fair? She thinks of just now, in the garden. How they came closer to the topic than they ever have before. Her father’s hand-squeeze. Her tears. His apparent forgiveness. It might be enough. It might still be enough for her.

She thinks about how the circumstances now seem to mirror that. That, deep down inside, she has a painful gut feeling that she is alone once more, the vulnerable one on the point of the triangle, about to be betrayed. That she feels she should act before she is forced to.

She pads back into the bedroom. The rainy night is blackening and charring the window. The radiator creaks and hisses as it fills. She lights a candle by the bed, a candle she bought a lifetime ago, when she was sixteen. It’s an old-style church candle. A big, fat pillar of dusted wax. She lights the others on the windowsill too. Dark-green wax sticks in old silver candlesticks. Like a little vigil, just for her.