He pulls a face. It’s a running joke how clumsy he is. On the night we first met at uni in Bournemouth he’d walked me back to my student digs after I’d had too much to drink. I could tell he was kind straight away: he took care of me, fetching me water and making me toast to nibble. I remember looking at him, as he’d crossed my shabby living room with a tray, and feeling a pang of fondness for him, this hot, slightly geeky guy with the floppy blond hair who was trying to impress me, when he tripped over the rug and the plate and mug went flying across the room. He froze in horror, his eyes meeting mine. Then we both cracked up and it broke the ice.

Since then he’s slipped on wet decking when we went to look around our first rental property with the estate agent, fallen over a tree stump and broken his ankle on a romantic walk in the woods, and only last year tripped over Snowy and put his back out for a week. Not to mention all the glasses and plates he’s dropped over the years. He says he’s not coordinated because he’s never got used to his long limbs and lanky frame. ‘Like a puppy German Shepherd that’s growing too fast,’ he’d joke.

Tom sets the plate carefully on the laminate work surface and picks up the oven dish from the rack with an exaggerated care that makes me laugh.

Mum rushes into the kitchen. She looks flustered. ‘I’ve just had a great idea,’ she says. ‘Why don’t we look through your gran’s things? All this talk of a Jean and a Victor. It’s got me curious.’

‘Her things?’ I say, taking the tea-towel from Tom to wipe my sudsy hands.

‘Yes. You know, the stuff we boxed up when we were packing her Bristol house.’

I frown. ‘We gave a lot of it away to charity. Her furniture and things.’

‘Yes, yes, but we kept her personal stuff, didn’t we, her admin and so on?’ She sounds impatient. I nod, remembering the envelopes and boxes of papers that were stuffed into her sideboard and we couldn’t be bothered to look through, telling ourselves we’d do it at a later date. But then we forgot and Mum went back to Spain. ‘What did you do with it all?’

‘I . . .’ I try to think. ‘It could be in the spare room or in the attic now. We still have a lot of unpacking to do.’

Mum raises an eyebrow at me as if to say, ‘But you’ve been living here months!’ I know she would have had it all done in the first week. ‘Okay, then. We need to find the boxes and go through them.’