I can’t meet my family’s eyes. Mum and Dad are stoic, looking straight ahead. Joe is staring at his feet. And Frannie isn’t there – of course she isn’t.

‘Do you miss her?’ Jason said, a few weeks into our meetings.

I knew who he had meant immediately. I had thought, in the past, that it would be hard to miss somebody when everything in your life had changed. If the world upended on to its side, could you still yearn for small things, a chat across the fence in the back garden before bed, a shared tea-making session in the middle of the working day? But I now know that emotions are organic, pushing up through the soil regardless of the terrain they will meet outside. ‘Every day,’ I’d said to Jason.

‘You don’t feel angry,’ he’d said, in that way of his. Direct questions, direct eye contact. Lawyers might sometimes feel like your therapist, but really they only ever want to get to the centre of the thing, to absolute clarity.

‘No, I don’t feel angry with Frannie,’ I said, thinking back to how she started it all, and is now … well.

Caring for her child is a curiously intimate experience. I was unprepared for the tasks that parenting Paul requires. Baths and walks and washing his tiny little clothes I expected. But not the juxtaposition of big questions – Where is the end of the earth? – and small – Do you like pegs?

And, anyway, it’s almost impossible to feel angry with somebody when their innocent little avatar lives in your house, sleeps on a cot bed in your spare room, sometimes in your bed. Who still carries little clutches of puzzle pieces and model dinosaurs around the house with him. Who still walks a little toddler-like at times, picking up his entire feet, soles flat. Who still confuses my and mine, and it seems impossible to explain the difference to him in a way that he will understand.

He would look nothing like Frannie if you sat them side by side. He doesn’t have Frannie’s large eyes or her big mouth. Paul is delicate. But there are similarities that I can’t even name that some days are so striking it is as if Frannie has appeared right there in the room. The way the light would hit her eyes. The shape of her frown. I can never imagine it, can only see it when it’s right in front of me.

‘And then what happened?’ the barrister says in a bored tone, bringing me back to the courtroom, to my family over there, the empty seat where Frannie ought to be.

‘They started to investigate,’ I say. ‘And that’s when …’ I take a steadying breath. ‘That’s when things started to go really wrong, I suppose.’

I look at Joe now, his face as familiar to me as my own. That heavy brow. His braced shoulders. He’s trying to look upstanding, as he sometimes does. We’ll never be estranged, even if we never speak again, not truly. It isn’t possible for family, for our family.