I forgot about my terrible pie skills and my heart ached for Morris, alone at home with his pie.

“My date is going to love this,” he said.

“What?” I said, lifting my head. “You have a date?”

“Morris, you old dog.” Ruby laughed.

“My Anna’s been gone five years, girls. Do you really think I would stay on the market long?”

“You said she was your soul mate,” I said.

I didn’t mean it to sound like an accusation but it did, and Ruby hit me on the arm to tell me to stop making the old man feel guilty for not spending the rest of his life in mourning.

“She was,” Morris said, surprised. “I think there’s another one out there and I’m going to find her. And the searching is good fun.”

“You don’t get more than one soul mate,” I said, annoyed. Morris was clearly just a dirty old man.

“Says who?” He didn’t seem angry with me for berating him. He just laughed a gentle wheezing laugh. “Girls, I don’t often go around giving advice to wains because I think you have to make your own mistakes in life, but I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t believe there’s one right person for everyone, and I spent fifty-one years with the same woman. But I do believe there’s a right person for you at different times in your life. Whether that relationship lasts a week or fifty years is not what makes it special.”

25.

The last night before the move, Ruby and I set up camp in my old room one last time to watch the only half-decent romantic comedy with lesbian characters, Imagine Me & You, surrounded by junk food and twinkly lights. It was a little weird knowing Dad was in the house, and he made his customary contraception jokes. But after the dinner, having her over didn’t seem like such a big deal. They’d both had their chance to be nosy about one another and I’d asked her to come over late enough that they wouldn’t really have time to interact. Besides, she had insisted on helping us move the next day because she is an angel. An intrusive kind of angel who doesn’t take No, seriously you don’t have to do that for an answer.

If I was being honest, I kind of liked the idea of spending my last night here with her. Dad suggested we spend the last night watching a horror film and eating our weight in Jaffa Cakes, but that picture in my head came with Mum somewhere in the background tutting about our terrible taste in cinema and food. Memories of my childhood haunted this house and I did not want to spend my evening with ghosts.