“Hello, Pumpkin,” Dad says, taking a step back to look at me. “You’re putting on a bit of weight, love.”

“Very funny.”

He gives me a big hug. Then Ross appears behind us with the bags and I move aside to let him clasp Dad’s hand and do their jolly shoulder-slapping thing.

Mum’s now at the foot of the stairs. “You look wonderful, darling.”

“She always was a good liar,” I say to Ross, and Mum pretends to look cross.

“You do look wonderful,” she says. “Just a little pale, that’s all. Which is only to be expected.”

“Did Mum tell you what’s happening this afternoon?” Dad asks.

“Yes, and it’s fine.”

“It seems so rude to disappear almost as soon as you’ve arrived,” Mum says. “Especially when I’ve been on at you to come down for ages. But we’ll only be gone an hour and a half. If there was any way we could have got out of it, we would have done.”

“Stop worrying, we’ll be fine.”

“You could even come with us if you wanted?”

I put my head on one side. “Hmm. Looking after Liz Metcalfe’s lighting shop for an hour and a half or lying on your sofa watching telly and eating cakes? What to do, what to do…”

I look at Ross and he joins in the game, pretends to be weighing up the options.

“Do you know what?” he says. “I think we’ll leave you to it.”

“Right, then,” Mum says. “Let’s sit down and catch up. Lunch will be ready in about an hour. More than enough time for Dad to bore you with the plans for our week in New York.”

—

Mum and Dad have just left the house for their shop-minding stint. I go upstairs to unpack our things in the spare room, leaving Ross dozing in front of the TV. Out of habit, I wander into my old bedroom and sit on the end of the single bed. As I gaze out at the North Sea, with the dock cranes in the distance, I feel myself soften and relax like I did the first time we moved here, when all the stress and tension I’d been holding in my body since the accident began its slow retreat, as though the tide was washing it away.

Dad always says that living by the sea is good for the soul. He would walk with me sometimes, in those early days, just the two of us, out on the sand in the early mornings, collecting driftwood and shells. We didn’t go in for long conversations. Occasionally we chatted about this and that, a TV program we’d both watched, or a book one or the other of us had read, but most of the time we walked in companionable silence. I really miss those walks.