Michel’s questioning eyebrows don’t get a response when we get back to the house. Julia says something to him quietly before taking my arm and leading me into the garden.

‘On y va, les enfants!’ Michel claps his hands, and I figure she’s told him to take them out somewhere.

I sit down on a garden chair and Julia stands looking at me, hands on her hips. She’s always appeared so sorted, so composed, it’s strange to see her looking confused and lost. It makes her seem more human somehow, more like me.

‘I don’t know what to do now,’ she says.

‘Me neither.’

‘We need a drink.’

She disappears into the house and returns with a bottle of wine and two glasses and a photo in a frame that, I remember with a jolt to my stomach, I’d seen sitting on the chest of drawers in her bedroom during one of my snooping episodes. It’s a photo of two women, probably not a lot older than I am now, sitting on a park bench by a lake eating ice cream. Looking at the clothes and hairstyles, I’d put it at mid-nineties.

‘This is Karin, my mother,’ she points to the woman on the left, in a long red skirt, gold hoop earrings visible beneath her voluminous mass of curly brown hair. ‘And this,’ she moves her finger, ‘is Angela, my aunt.’

I take the photo from her and stare at their faces. What strikes me most is the joy they exude. Both women are smiling, relaxed, happy, their natural closeness obvious.

‘You’ve never mentioned your family.’

‘Mum died ten years ago. She didn’t have a very easy life. And I never really knew my father. He left when I was little.’ She takes the photo from me and looks at it. ‘So I like this photo, because it reminds me that she did have some happiness, some good times.’

‘I’m sorry she’s gone.’

She nods, gives me a small smile. ‘I know you are.’

I look at her with new eyes. All the assumptions I’ve made about her have dissolved into nothing and I realise I’ve never known her at all. And while she may not be my parents’ child, the other daughter, we have more in common than I took the time to see.

‘You know, when I first arrived here, Léa told me you’d said to her she could achieve anything she wanted in life if she put her mind to it. It’s stuck with me because that’s exactly what my mother always said to me.’

Julia smiles. ‘She sounds like a wise woman.’