How was he? Really? According to Lily, he was still barely leaving his flat – ‘lying a bit low’, as he had apparently put it in one of the breezy texts that their daughter was now supposed to accept as sufficient communication. And how was Heidi being? Did the woman understand the extent of the shame, the visceral pain that Lucas would be going through… to have his entire reputation, built up over decades, trashed? His hubris had certainly deserved a comeuppance, but not that.

The athlete had been in a car crash and had needed to learn how to walk again. The big wild sky and beauty of the Shropshire hills had helped her come to terms with the loss of her career, she explained, by showing her new perspective, new hope, new meaning. Esther listened intently, finding herself cast back to the very first parental visit with Lucas, shouting through her open passenger window – her hair flapping and streaming around her ears and mouth – at the outrageous magnificence of an area of which she’d had no previous knowledge, with its winding, broad, lush valleys, skirted by the high lowering ridges, shifting that day between black and purple and green as the sun had nudged its way through the banks of cloud. Landscape derived meaning only from its human associations, Lucas had countered bitterly. Turning in her seat, Esther had seen the contained suffering in his rigid profile, the concrete set of his jaw. She had placed her hand over his as it worked the gearstick, squeezing gently, willing some of the hurt to enter her.

Esther realised she was gripping the aerosol. She and Lucas had found something, and then lost it. She had been jealous, of Cambridge, of Lucas’s passion and growing status. She had felt swamped by motherhood, got fed up, become distant. She had, sometimes, turned her back on him. She had begun to lose faith.

Esther put down the spray can and switched off the podcast. She lowered herself into Dylan’s little desk chair, a dizzying loneliness rolling through her. Into the third year now of a reacquired single life and on the battling went, but she was managing better. Bloodied but unbowed, as some poet had said. But oh God, what was the point of a life lived so alone? Esther clasped the edge of the table.