‘Heidi called me.’ She spoke briskly, but fondly, skipping up the last few stairs. ‘She said to visit, that she was worried about you. I brought some soup and a few other things.’ She swung a bulging bag of groceries dangling from two fingers in one hand. ‘You’re on a break, she said. Sorry to hear that, Dad, but it’s nice to see you all the same.’ She looped her arm through his and led him back towards his flat door. Lucas let himself be steered, finding it hard to look at her, with her face so aglow from the cold air, so knowing.

‘I thought I might stay over for a few days. If it’s okay with you.’

He nodded, because he could not speak.

40

‘He’s not abroad?’ Lucas said, for the third time, sounding as dazed as he looked. His face was bruised with tiredness, saggy under the eyes, the skin blotchy.

‘And you went to Amsterdam with a friend,’ Lily put in, also repeating what Esther had told them, but in a tone more reminiscent of a sceptical detective, ‘using an old bag of Dyl’s and finding his passport in the bottom of it. Last night. On your way back.’

Esther stared between the on-screen faces of her ex-husband and their daughter, side by side at Lucas’s dining-room table, instead of dialling in separately as she had expected. Lily was radiating an energy that made her father’s pallor even more marked; and they were sitting so closely, arms resting parallel and touching, that a pulse of the old ugly jealousy had stirred beneath her gladness that some sort of rapprochement had obviously been managed between them. Both had progressed from astonishment at the revelation of Dylan’s faux communications, to resigned agreement that it was not such a hard trick to pull off, Lily citing a popular app that allowed photographs to be sent from anywhere in the world as postcards. Reinforcement of just how easy it was had been proven by another postcard landing on Esther’s doormat that morning, of Mayan pyramids and bearing a Love you Mum that she had kissed with relief, while fighting down the confusing sense of him being both nearer and further away.

‘And you knew nothing about this Mei Lin girl?’ Lucas turned to address the question to Lily, his voice pained and flat.

‘No,’ she protested. ‘I mean…’ she made a visible effort to calm herself ‘…I already told Mum that ages ago.’ She patted Lucas’s arm and then threw a wan smile at Esther. ‘Look, Dad… and Mum… the thing is, I am worried, obviously, but also, I have to say that I think Dylan is behaving like a total idiot, doing this to all of us. How is he going to get anything sorted if he just stays away?’