“What I remember most about my mother,” he begins, looking at me and Dad as he says it, “is her coming in when my brother or I had a nightmare. She’d come in and sit by our beds and tell us stories—nice, safe, gentle stories, to help us go to sleep again. She’d say that her stories were magic. That her stories could chase nightmares away, so we only had good dreams. She took her magic stories to another house when I was seventeen.” He pauses and takes a deep breath. “I like to think the magic worked there too on her new family.”

There’s a lump in my throat that aches as he continues talking about a woman I don’t know and don’t recognize. Dad’s squeezing my hand so hard it hurts and I can feel him shaking next to me. I should have offered to speak. I should have done this for him, like I should have been there for him since Bella died, like I should have been there when Julia first got ill.

“I regret not seeing more of her since her wedding to Leo,” Jack’s saying now, and Dad lets out a shuddering sigh next to me. “I was angry—we were angry, but Mum was happy with her new family, like she was never happy with us. I don’t know why, maybe I’ll never know now that she’s…but I regret it because if I’d got to know Leo and Bella and Tess, I could have had a second family too—this second family who must have been so special, so amazing, she could walk away from us and not look back.” He stops and I think maybe he’s getting upset. He looks down and when he looks up, I expect there to be tears, but instead of tears, there’s that smile again, bigger, aimed right at me and Dad, who’s now openly sobbing.

“Still,” he says after a pause that lasts a decade. “It’s not too late, is it? Perhaps now that my wife has kicked me out and both my parents are dead, I can move in with Tess and Leo. Play happy families like Julia did.”

I stand up as Jack sits down, arms folded, still smiling. It’s not fair. Not fair for those to be the only words spoken at her funeral—not fair to Julia, not fair to Dad, who’s in no fit state to speak. I move past Dad and walk up to the front, stand next to the vicar.