My bravado was wilting too. A few days off work? Had I said that? A trip away, all on my own, without Dad? It felt like an impossibility, but now I’d voiced it out loud, I couldn’t stop turning it over in my mind. It struck me how narrow I had become over the last five years; how little I thought about anything novel in the course of an average day. I worried about Dad a lot and brooded over my dead sister, and of course there were the mundane practicalities of life—but that was all. My job as a very small cog in a very large machine called K&G Financial Services barely occupied my mind when I was doing it, never mind out of hours.

I used to be known as a reader. “Freya’s the bookworm of the family,” Dad was still in the habit of saying to anyone who might be interested, but even that was becoming a false reputation. I’d barely read a word since Stella’s death. I knew a bit about art, but only because Dad was such an expert. I’d lost sight of whether it actually interested me or not.

There was always Tom, of course, to absorb my thoughts—or there always used to be Tom. When I was lying awake at night, wishing I had a life worth the name, I tended to picture myself with him. It was a guilty habit I still clung to, although the guilt and the pleasure weren’t as piquant as they used to be. Maybe I’d begun to doubt whether Stella, being dead, minded what Tom and I got up to in my imagination.

I prattled desperately during the walk home from the station, my questions echoing round the silent streets. “Which was your favourite room?” I wanted to know. “Which was your favourite picture?” “Did you read Tom’s essay?” “Do you like the sketches best, or the finished drawings?”

“Not sure,” Dad would answer, or “Hmm,” or “It depends.”

When we got in, he dropped the catalogue on the hall table and stood like a statue while I locked up; he didn’t even move when the cat appeared and wound itself about his legs. At least he let me shuffle his jacket off—shifting his shoulders and unbending his elbows to help—but when I returned from the cupboard under the stairs I found him standing in the same place, absorbed and sad, with an old man’s sagging posture.

“Cup of tea?” I stooped to rub the cat’s cheek. My phone pinged, but when I opened it to look there were only work emails.

“Uh?”

“Tea?”

He pondered my question for a while. “If you’re making one.”

I flicked a lamp on in the sitting room and Dad sat down on the sofa. If only we could have filled our terraced house with Raphaels and Leonardos. Our home was cluttered with things that meant little to either of us; things that had drained themselves of sentimental value over time, instead of accruing it. There were antique maps of counties we’d never lived in, china ornaments whose provenance we’d forgotten, black-and-white photos of ancestors whose deaths had faded to mere dates or minor biographical details. There used to be framed photos of my mother and sister on the mantelpiece, but these had been deemed too painful to look at—eighteen years ago and five years ago, respectively—so they’d been wrapped in felt cloths and removed to a dresser drawer. Every so often, when I knew Dad wasn’t around, I’d creep downstairs and get them out. I know he sometimes looked at them too; the way he folded the cloths was different.