Separately, of course. As far as Alexa knew, Marcus and Elizabeth hadn’t been in the same room since she was fourteen, and then it was by mistake; an absent-minded mutual friend had invited them both to the same summer party. Her father had been the one to leave. Unfortunately, social sacrifices rather came with the territory when you had gambled away £30,000 of the family’s savings playing high-stakes online poker (it was 2003, and he’d been an early adopter). Elizabeth had found out in the normal, awful way; he’d forgotten to close down his AOL account one evening. When she’d slunk off to play solitaire on the Apple Mac in the large garden shed that doubled as his home office, the mishap had been writ large on the screen. Unfortunately, Alexa had been unable to repress the memory of her mother going for her father with her big handbag, shouting that he was a ‘parasite’. Alexa remembered wishing that, aged eleven, she didn’t already know what that word meant.

Alexa wasn’t certain they’d been happy before – until they became unhappy, she hadn’t had much cause to think about it. Shortly after, her father had moved first into the office/shed – it had a daybed, which soon became his only bed – and later into a series of flats in south-west London. Alexa, always a rather self-possessed child, did not tell anyone at school this. Around this time she developed a tendency to chew her knuckles until they were red and chapped, until one day, her mother spotted this and – aghast – insisted that she wear gloves all day and all night until the skin grew back. Alexa learned her lesson, namely that it was easier for all involved if she did not give any outward indication of inner turmoil.