When I didn’t reply, she came away from the window. ‘Howard?’ The plastic cushion on the kitchen chair gave out a puff of air as she sat down. She sighed. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you something. After your father died, people thought I might not be able to carry on. But I had you, and in a few years, if I’m honest, I barely missed him.’ She caught hold of my chin and looked me in the eye. ‘I hardly missed him, Howard, because you were my little man. No one could ever say you aren’t man enough. Not in my book.’

She put a hand on my shoulder and rubbed. A sob built in my chest, and I knew that if she embraced me my tears would fall. But she just let her hand rest on my shoulder.

‘Robert will be fine. You’ll see.’

I watched the rain hammer on the glass of the back door, and I pictured my beds turning to mud.

Later that week, I came home from work to the noise of a drill. The sound of a whirling blade biting into wood or plaster has always set my teeth on edge.

I followed the noise upstairs to Robert’s bedroom. I put my briefcase down and tapped Kathryn on the shoulder, but she didn’t stop drilling into his doorframe. Her cheeks were warm, her eyes bright with concentration. I was reminded of the look she’d had the day she leant out of our back bedroom window and let the poppy seeds fall to the ground.

I tapped her on the shoulder again. She stopped the drill but didn’t look at me. Instead, she stooped down to pick up a bronze bolt lock from the top of my toolbox, which was by her feet.

‘You could have just screwed that in,’ I said.

She shrugged and rummaged in my toolbox for screws. I thought of how her fingers would smell metallic when she was finished.

‘You’re early,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ she said. ‘I’m fixing Robert a lock on his door.’

I didn’t want to respond irrationally, so I took a few moments to remove my coat and hang it over the stair banister. ‘Why didn’t you ask me to do that?’ I said, loosening my tie.

‘Because you would have said no.’ She held a screw against the hole in the bolt and squinted.

‘That won’t do it,’ I said. ‘And you know there’s no need for him to have a lock.’ Getting angry, I told myself, would not help this situation. It would not help this situation at all. ‘When did he ask for a lock?’

Kathryn turned the screw. ‘It was my idea.’

‘What?’

‘He needs some privacy.’

‘He’s fifteen!’