Theo kneels down on the dry grass and traces his fingers along the date on the headstone. Wednesday, 12 May 2004. Today is the fourteenth anniversary of her death. How can it be fourteen years, he wonders, when it still feels like it happened yesterday? Theo had been away at university in York when he got the phone call that changed his life. He’d been nineteen. And despite the heat of the day he shivers when he remembers. His father’s deep, commanding voice, thick with emotion at the end of the line. She’s fallen, he’d said. She’s fallen down the stairs and she’s dead. I’m so sorry, son. I’m so sorry. Theo had been standing at the student-union bar with a group of mates jostling either side of him, the mobile in his hand, unable to comprehend what his dad was telling him when everyone around him was drinking, jolly and singing. You need to come home. He’d taken the bus straight away, thankful that the bender he’d been envisaging had just begun and he’d had the chance to drink only half a pint. He remembers the journey from York to Harrogate clearly even after all these years. He remembers hoping that his dad was confused and had got it wrong, even though he knew there was nothing wrong with his sharp mind.

At the hospital he’d looked broken. Diminished and old. What am I going to do? he’d said over and over again, his face grey. What am I going to do now?

Theo never went back to finish his medical degree. Instead, for the remainder of that academic year he stayed with his dad in the ugly mansion he’s always hated and tried to find memories of his mother in its every corner. But all he could see when he closed his eyes at night was the image of her falling down that fucking elaborate oak staircase, then lying crumpled and broken at the bottom. She’d been there all day, apparently, until his father came home from work and found her. His dad said she’d died instantly, but to this day Theo doesn’t know whether to believe it. He still tortures himself that she lay there, on that beeswaxed parquet, in pain and unable to move to get to a phone for help. She’d died while Theo was busy shagging his first girlfriend in his cramped room in a shared student house in York. That September he changed his course to catering and hospitality, much to the derision of his dad. But he knew his mum would have been happy for him, would have told him life’s too short.