It was an unlikely thing for us to do—as unlikely as that spa outing—but I’d suggested it as a treat to cheer Azra up. She had sunk into a depression. I’d never seen her in that state before, my strong, resilient friend. In fact I’d never seen her cry.

In all the years I’d known her she’d hardly mentioned her father. ‘He buggered off when I was a baby,’ was all she’d said. I thought she’d dismissed him from her life. A violent stepfather had come and gone, but she seldom talked about her childhood and, as I said, she’d left home for good when she was a teenager and strode into the future, armour-plated.

But she wasn’t. Nobody is. I realised how little I knew her when she told me, one day, that she was going to track her father down. She was in her mid-sixties by then; it had taken her a long time to come to this decision. I gently suggested he might be dead but she shrugged this off. So then I offered to go to Cyprus with her but she wanted to do it alone.

So she did. She flew to Cyprus. And after a week of following up various leads she discovered that her father had indeed died.

The effect on her was pretty catastrophic. I was surprised. In the past, when I’d mentioned her father she’d airily said, ‘He’s nothing to me, he might as well be dead.’ But now he was actually dead she was distraught.

I was musing about this as I sat on the bed. Azra had said, the possibilities have gone. Whatever her father was like, however he’d behaved, whether she’d ever see him again, whether or not he ever thought about her, whether or not he was a shit, the very fact that he was in the world—it was all snuffed out. She was overcome with loss. I remember thinking how strange it was, to be so affected by the death of someone she’d hardly known. I myself had simply felt relief when my much-loved but demented mother died. I thought how grief waits in ambush in the most unlikely places, waiting to pounce at the most unlikely times. I realised, in fact, the importance of a funeral. The closure, the laying-to-rest.

I tried to help Azra, but she withdrew from me. For some months we hardly saw each other. When we did, she seemed closed off and irritable. I blamed it on the father business. But recently I’d realised the true reason; it was around that time that she started sleeping with my husband.