I didn’t reply, didn’t lay out my case. I waited. I wanted to see what he was going to say. It was strange watching him, his face, his body language giving away every thought as clearly as if I could read his mind. I watched the shift from indignation to resignation.

Finally, he sat opposite me at the table and put his head in his hands, flattening his hair to his scalp, his forehead wrinkling so hard it would give him a headache later.

When he spoke, he spoke to the table.

“I didn’t want you to find out this way. We met a few months ago and we got along. We’ve been on a few dates. I meant to tell you, but I wanted to wait until I knew it was going to be something.”

It helped that he sounded like a character from a TV show. That he was such a cliché, it made the whole thing feel less real.

“But Mum,” I said. “You’re cheating on her.”

I remembered them telling me about the divorce, emphasizing how it was only on paper. Was that always a lie?

“Saoirse, your mum’s condition deteriorated a long time ago. She doesn’t even know who I am.”

“That bit is new,” I objected.

“It’s been at least a year, love.”

A year is not that long.

“I wasn’t looking for someone,” he said as though that was a defense.

When I didn’t say, Oh, well, it’s all right if she just fell in your lap then, he continued. “Sometimes when I visit Liz she thinks I’m one of the staff. Twenty years we were together and when she looks at me like I’m a stranger it kills me. I know it isn’t true and she can’t help it, but some days it feels like it all meant nothing to her.”

That winded me. She looked at me that way too. Did that mean all the years she’d been my mum meant nothing? Did it stop counting the first time she called me Claire, her sister’s name, or the tenth, or the two hundredth?

I could understand Dad feeling the way he did, but I could not understand him giving up and abandoning her for someone fresh.

“Is this why you put her in the home? So you could go off with someone else?”

He flinched.

“God. No. Of course not. You know that we weren’t able to look after her here. It wasn’t safe anymore. She needs 24-7 care. You know that,” he said, and locked eyes with me. “You agreed to that.”

Disgust roiled in my stomach. He’d been pushing to get rid of her for ages before I finally gave in. I stood up, pushing the chair back against the tiles with a screech.

“I don’t ever want to see that woman here again.”