Esther was too thankful to mind his smugness. She raised a finger to command silence instead and gently opened the door a crack, needing badly to see Dylan with her own eyes. Her heart settled still further at the sight of a foot poking out from under the mountain of the duvet, so Neanderthal in shape and hairiness that for a moment a wave of incredulity overtook her at the memory of the white-ringleted, blue-eyed tot who, not so many years before, had regularly caused strangers to coo over the buggy in parks and supermarkets. Both children had her Scandi colouring – Lily with the extra blessing of the fine-boned petiteness of Esther’s mother, Astrid – but Dylan as a baby had definitely been the cutest. He had also been the more difficult, agonisingly reluctant to be born, taking twenty-three hours compared to Lily’s two and a half – ‘a child on a mission,’ the midwife had joked of her daughter. A similar resistance to the business of finding contentment had dominated Dylan’s babyhood. Sleeping, feeding, being held, not being held – all the things a swaddled Lily had taken to with ease, her son had fought from the get-go like a raging mini sumo wrestler. The only thing guaranteed to make him chortle were the antics of his toddler sibling. Lily predictably had caught on to this power quickly, so often using the trick of springing out of hiding places shouting ‘boo’ that it was the first word ever to blow from Dylan’s lips, as well as the name he still used for her sometimes, when they were horsing around.

Esther had been engrossed by the sibling closeness that unfolded, the secret sign language, the sheer self-containment, the private hilarities. Only Lucas’s insistence that Lily’s atomic brain-power warranted moving her to a different school had seen its easing. Left behind, Dylan’s softer, more drifty nature had begun to emerge in earnest, manifesting itself in markedly poorer grades than his sister’s and in dreamy insouciance. He was more like her, Esther would jokily and protectively point out – knowing what Lucas was thinking and not saying – with a good heart but tendencies towards chaos and great intentions that didn’t always come off.

Esther softly closed Dylan’s door, experiencing a faint shudder of a memory of the ambulance incident with which she had taunted Lucas. An accident and a one-off, Dylan had promised breezily, sitting up in the A & E cubicle bed afterwards, as if losing consciousness forty-five minutes after swallowing a small white tablet ‘gifted’ by a stranger at a party could happen to any fifteen-year-old. Luckily, the doctor on duty, a square-set rugby-playing sort and straight talker, had stepped in with a chilling catalogue of the range of potentially fatal reactions to MDMA: hypertension, hyperthermia, overheating, overhydration. ‘Basically, you could die, mate, and that’s the bottom line.’