Gina surrendered the book. ‘If you must.’

When she was little, Kym would beg to be allowed to look in her gran’s photo albums, with no idea that it was unusual for the smiling young man in the vivid snapshots to feel as absent, as far removed as the stiff figures in their uniforms, as the great great grandparents in their Victorian finery. Then, they had all been part of the same story.

Now, of course, she knew to tread carefully.

She started with the school photos, nursery, primary, then secondary school – the same boy growing up with the turn of a page. She didn’t look much like him, although sometimes she thought they had the same eyes, pale blue, the iris ringed with grey. His hair was dark, like his own father, hers was darker, and had come out of a bottle. ‘Handsome lad,’ she said as she usually did at this point.

‘And he knew it,’ said Gina. The photos on the next page were more informal and seemed to have been taken by a variety of people over the period of maybe a couple of years. Kym had never asked, but she assumed this had all been put together by her gran afterwards. Maybe she had asked family and friends to contribute; and in some he was almost edged out of the frame, or looking away from the lens. In one or two he was blurred as if startled by the instruction to smile.

The photos on the final page featured her dad and her mother, Kate; tight jeans and baggy T-shirts, all long hair and eyeliner. When she was younger, Kym had thought it romantic, the way they leant into each other in the pictures, holding hands, her sitting in his lap. Now she’s almost embarrassed – they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

She’s glad of the last picture, though – taken when Kate was hugely pregnant with Kym herself. Because you can see it in the dopey expression on their faces – it hadn’t mattered that they weren’t married. It hadn’t mattered that they weren’t much more than kids themselves – they had been in love, they had been happy.

‘What’s brought all this on, then?’ Kym asked, still gazing at the picture of her mother, self-consciously resting one hand on her baby bump, and so terribly, terrifyingly young.

‘Nothing much.’ Gina retrieved the album and closed it gently. ‘I was just – thinking, that’s all.’

‘Am I like him?’ Kym had asked this question before too.

‘I don’t know,’ said Gina. ‘There are times when I think I barely got to know him.’

Kym stood and went to the window, they couldn’t see the Wilson’s house from here, but they had a view of Elder House, side on to them, forcing itself up against the cliff, trapped in the shade.