‘It’s a fifteen-minute walk home,’ Cat told herself, ‘She’ll be fine. If anyone is tough enough to scare away the fairies, it’s Granny Mary.’

At half seven, Cat’s mam came back downstairs, collapsed onto the couch and turned on the TV, sighing contentedly. ‘Would you mind making us a cuppa, Kitty-Cat? I bought biscuits for us on the way home, the good ones with the chocolate on top.’

Cat nodded. This had become a nightly ritual for them. On nights when her mam didn’t have to rush back out the door to attend class, Cat would make them both a cup of tea and they would sit and watch television together before bed. She loved this time alone with her mam when Mikey was fast asleep and it was just the two of them. For most of her life it had been just the two of them. Her dad had left when she was small. So small that for years she couldn’t even picture his face. In her imagination he looked like her friends’ dads, with a moustache and a prickly beard and he always wore a suit and tie. For years, she’d daydream that he’d come back to her; then, one day, he did.

He didn’t look like her imagination-dad: he was younger, for one thing, and instead of a suit and tie he wore jeans and a plain polo shirt. His face was clean shaven and he always smelled of aftershave. Cat’s nose wrinkled the first time he hugged her, but she soon got used to it. She even began to like it. It was his smell. Her dad’s smell.

She was shy with him at first, but she soon came around when he began bringing her small gifts and taking her out for day trips to the seaside. She still had one of his presents – a fine gold necklace with a delicate heart-shaped pendant. Cat didn’t really like jewellery, but she never told him that. She was just so happy to receive something, anything at all, to show the world how much he loved her. She fantasised about rubbing Shane’s face in it – ‘See, he came back! He does like being around me’ – but she wasn’t that cruel. She was just content with the knowledge that it was true.

Eventually, he managed to win her mam over and for a while it felt like they were a real family again. Everything in Cat’s life was finally perfect. And then her mam became pregnant with Mikey. At first her dad was attentive and loving, talking about it being a fresh start for all of them. He would speak about what they would do after the baby came, perhaps they would even move to a bigger house, closer the city.

Then one day, when Mikey was a few weeks old, her dad left again and this time Cat knew it would be for good. She remembered every detail of that day. It sat in her memory like a bruise she couldn’t stop poking to see if it still hurt. He had come into her room with a backpack slung over one shoulder and sat beside her on the bed. He told her he was sorry, but he wasn’t really built to be a father and then he left. He hadn’t even looked at her or held her when she cried. That was over a year ago and none of them had heard a word from him since. Her mam cried for weeks after he walked out, and Cat didn’t know what to do to help her. How could she when she didn’t even know how to help herself?