‘When John brought his first girlfriend home to meet us, he called ahead first. They’d been dating nearly four months, so it seemed like things were looking serious. But when he called ahead, he told us that she thought his name was James. She must have misheard it when they first met or something, and rather than correcting her, he just let her keep calling him James.’

‘No!’

‘Swear on my life,’ he said. ‘It gets worse: he was calling ahead to ask that when she was around we all call him James too!’

‘What did you do?’

‘What could we do? We called him James the whole time. Thankfully it didn’t last too long!’

He threw his head back, tears in his eyes, shaking his head. It felt good to watch him laugh, and even better to laugh herself. Slowly though, reality drifted in again, like tear gas.

‘I wish he’d let me in,’ she said, driving a dagger into the heart of Fisher’s good mood. ‘Whatever he was chasing out here, I just wish he’d asked for help.’

Fisher’s smile vanished. ‘He did.’

‘He did what?’ she asked.

‘John called me, Kate. On the morning he left to come here. I didn’t know it at the time, but I checked it against my phone log later. He told me he was on his way to the airport, that he was about to fly out to London for the palliative care research colloquium. The same lie he told you. But he was quiet, and strange.’

‘Strange how?’

‘You were married to my son long enough to know he rarely went directly at a thing. He danced around a subject until you talked it out of him. He was doing the same dance when he called. There was something on his mind. He … wanted to talk.’

He dropped each word slowly, like stones from a bridge, watching them tumble through the air and disappear in a splash.

‘I was at Woolworths with a shopping list as long as my arm,’ he went on. ‘I was in the pasta section, trying to find something that was gluten-free because Pam’s been on a no-gluten diet and those labels are so small, and I’d been getting calls from the Porsche club all morning because the new president is a bloody fool and … I was busy, Kate. Too busy to talk to my son. If I had acted like his father … Instead, I acted like mine.’

Be a man, Kate thought.

‘This isn’t on you, Fisher,’ Kate said. ‘It’s not on me, either. Like you said, he had friends, colleagues, Pam. He had a support network that he chose not to use. That can’t be on us.’

Fisher dabbed his eye with the sleeve of his jacket. ‘He was lucky to have you, Kate.’

‘He was lucky to have both of us,’ she said.