‘You’ve only just finished renovating this place,’ I say. ‘The paint’s barely dry!’

‘Which is why it’s the perfect time to sell.’

I sigh. ‘Millie, I’ve got a shit-ton of stuff going on at work at the moment. It’s my busiest time. And I’m not sure the kids need the upheaval right now, either. Peter’s still finding his feet, and Meddie’s already got to cope with changing schools in September.’

‘The Glass House is closer to the Tube,’ Millie wheedles. ‘Meddie will be able to get herself to and from school without a long walk home in the dark during the winter. And you’ve been saying for ages we need more space,’ she adds. ‘You’ll be able to have a proper office instead of having to use the basement. It’s our dream house, Tom. You can’t say no.’

I never could, not to her.

She senses me weakening, and laughs, throwing her arms around my waist. ‘It’s on the list, Tom,’ she says. ‘It’s one of my five. You don’t actually have a choice.’

She isn’t joking. Her persuasive coaxing is no more than a fig leaf for my pride. There was never any question I’d agree. It’s a shame: I like the area we’re in now. We’ve got good neighbours – everyone turned out for the street party last summer. The kids have grown up here. It’s going to be a wrench.

But Millie isn’t asking for my permission. I should be grateful the twelfth-century stone tower she fell in love with in Italy a few years back never came onto the market.

‘Can you imagine?’ she says dreamily. ‘Us in the Glass House?’

Where we live, what car I drive, the number of zeros in my bank account – none of it’s ever mattered to me, not really. But I understand why it matters to Millie.

Her father worked as a carpet fitter – when he was sober, anyway. Nothing wrong with that: good, honest work. And Millie’s not a snob. But Terry Lennox knew he’d married up – Millie’s mother, Charlotte, was a teacher whose family had had money once upon a time – and he never forgave his wife for it. And he never forgave his daughter either: for being smarter than he was, for having ambitions beyond his horizons.

He blacked her eye when she won a scholarship to a private convent school at seven. He broke her arm when she was awarded a national science prize. He put her in hospital with a ruptured spleen when she came home with thirteen A* grades in her mock GCSEs. If he hadn’t died before she got into Cambridge, he’d have probably killed her for doing so.