‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you. You were the one who used to moan about the sort of woman Mum had turned into. You were the one who resented the amount of money she spent on clothes and the fact that she was so obsessed with always looking her best, but,’ I added, jabbing a finger at the printed page, ‘did you ever stop to think about why she did all that?’

I didn’t give him a chance to answer.

‘She did it,’ I charged on, ‘because she was trying to put a brave face on things. She didn’t want the rest of the world knowing that she was crumbling inside because of your endless affairs, so she made the outside of herself as beautiful and groomed as she possibly could. She invested in all those designer outfits,’ I raged, ‘because—’

‘Because,’ Dad interrupted, reaching for my hand before I could move it out of his reach, ‘the woman who owned her favourite boutique was your mother’s lover, and your mum used her shopping habit as an excuse to spend time with her.’

The silence which descended was so complete, so deep, I was sure I could hear waves lapping the shore, even though the tide was out. Or was the rushing sound just in my head? It seemed to fill the spaces in and around me and was accompanied by a sudden light-headedness which before had heralded the arrival of a vertigo attack.

‘What?’ I croaked.

‘I’m sorry to just blurt it out like that, Tess,’ Dad said as he squeezed my hand harder and everything began to look fuzzy around the edges, ‘but it wasn’t pages from your mum’s diary that you found. They were from mine.’

I closed my eyes, but that didn’t help stave off the spinning sensation and I slowly, very slowly, opened them again.

‘You’ve been reading my reaction to your mother’s affairs,’ he said, ‘not her reaction to mine.’

The expression in his eyes and the set of his mouth suggested he was telling the truth, but surely that couldn’t be right.

‘But Mum wasn’t a lesbian,’ I finally whispered, ‘she was married to you. She had me . . . and the way the diary was worded . . .’

‘She was,’ he whispered back. ‘I know it’s hard to get your head around Tess, but your mum was gay. Throughout the early years of our marriage, she did everything she could to make herself believe that she wasn’t, but she was and, in the end, she gave up trying to pretend otherwise.’

‘But the diary,’ I stammered.

‘I had to be careful how I wrote it,’ he explained, ‘I wanted, needed, to get my feelings out of my head but knew a book could be found and a computer could be hacked, so in the end I settled for trying to make it read as if . . .’