I tried to recall the faces of my mother’s friends. Had this Gerrit been the reason for my mother’s increasing distraction in the last few months of her life. She’d been even more closed off than usual. I was living almost permanently at Bram’s, returning to my parents’ house only on weekends.

Bram’s mother Carlijn had taken me under her wing. With four boys and one husband to care for, I think she saw my presence as a way of counterbalancing the male energy within the household. She kept a bed made up for me in her craft room, her fortress of femininity – floral armchairs and chenille quilts and pressed flowers blooming in gilded frames. She loved to sit with me and talk about what I planned to do once I graduated high school. One summer, she taught me how to sew but, although I enjoyed the practice, I abandoned it quickly in favour of the much more thrilling hobby of scuba diving.

On land, Bram’s father, Tomas, seemed awkward and reserved, but he transformed in the water. He was warm and effusive, eager to share the diving skills he’d spent a lifetime perfecting. Although he was careful never to endanger us, he consistently pushed us beyond our comfort zones, taking us to dive sites that even more experienced divers might have found challenging. We returned home happy but exhausted, eagerly anticipating the hot chocolate Bram’s mother always had waiting for us. I doubt my own mother even noticed what I was up to. When I’d mentioned to her, the day before that ill-fated trip to Saeftinghe, that I planned to stay at Bram’s so we could get up early to go diving, she blinked as if I were a stranger or someone whose face she recognised but whose name was now forgotten. She’d been fiddling with her wedding ring, twisting it this way and that, turning it so the metal caught the light from the kitchen windows and refracted it into a thousand tiny rainbows.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Be careful.’

The lukewarm warning irritated me even more than the compulsive fidgeting with the ring. I remember shouting at her, accusing her of parental negligence (I would not, under normal circumstances, have chosen that phrase, but I’d overheard Carlijn say it and I liked the way it sounded, the irrefutable recrimination it implied). My mother only stared at me for a long moment, looking sad, before turning away.

My thoughts returned to the present at the sound of Marieke’s voice. ‘Gerrit wasn’t from Texel, originally,’ she said. ‘He was a southerner, I think. Somewhere near Middleburg.’

I ran a damp palm along my thigh. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’