I try to imagine what it would feel like if Lottie refused to speak to me. It would be devastating. Anna must feel the same about Kai; and yet she’s cut her mother out of her life, and her grandchild’s life. She had been through a trauma, but still, why add to their pain?

‘What happened?’

I go back to my chair and sit down, lean on my elbows and watch her. She pulls her eyes from mine and looks down, scratching a dried blob of paint from the knuckle of her thumb.

‘Do you want the short version, or the long one?’ she asks.

‘I have plenty of time.’

Finally, she looks up and shrugs. ‘Well, OK. I’m the oldest of four. Two girls, two boys. Alex, obviously, and Rory. It’s the typical thing, all the pressure on the first baby to be perfect, to speak early, to walk early, to achieve more than the other babies popped out by the women you’ve met at the NCT. Then two years later Izzy comes along, premature and fighting for life. I was a stroppy, spiky little thing, who didn’t like to be cuddled for too long, but Izzy, when she was tiny, would lie on Mum’s chest, like she was still inside her. Alex and Rory were princes and Izzy was Mum’s little warrior. I slipped between the cracks. So, anyway, I became a disgustingly attention-seeking child, and a filthy-tempered, equally attention-seeking adolescent and when the terrible things started happening – did Alex tell you that Dad lost his money thanks to Tim Ritchie?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah, well. After what happened to Izzy, it almost killed him. I started counting the days till I could go. I finished my GCSEs, packed my bags and went back to London.’

‘Where did you stay?’

‘With my godmother in Hackney, while I did my A levels. Then I moved out. So what else did Alex say? I suppose he told you all about that holiday?’

‘Not much. Just what happened to your sister. It’s Nick I want to know about.’

She tilts her head, squeezes her eyes shut and rubs her fingers across the bridge of her nose. She takes a deep breath. ‘I gave Nick a really hard time.’

‘Why?’

‘He’d upset me. I’d caught him kissing a friend of mine and I wanted to punish him. It was one of the reasons I was so keen to talk to him. I wanted to apologize for being such a bitch that summer. It backfired on me big-time. Everyone started to hate me. I would have stopped it all and made friends with Nick again.’ She draws a long sigh. ‘But then Izzy died, and our family fell apart. I didn’t want to talk to any of them. I avoided Nick. I had little to do with my brothers – there was too big a gap between us.’