She runs up Sugar House Lane towards the van. Beside the old warehouses, newly converted into ‘luxury apartments’, a fox crosses her path, its breath pluming the night air. The driver’s side door of the orange 1999 Ford Connect – which Nevis christened Gerry – gives with a ‘thunk’ and a musky blast. A pool of stagnant water sits in the passenger side footwell, the result of some leakage whose source she has never been able to locate. Moss grows on the interior seals. She hopes the cold won’t prevent the engine starting. The key hasn’t been turned in weeks. Time was she needed a vehicle to haul boat supplies – timber, marine varnish, engine and pump parts – from the chandlers in Essex, but these days everything’s available online for delivery and most of her work is now fixing and repairing other boats on the canal. Gerry remains hers out of sentiment and to haul Nevis’s things to and from university at the beginning and end of each academic year, though now Nevis is no longer living on campus that’s probably not so necessary either. Day trips to visit her daughter are easier by train. An hour and forty-five minutes and not too expensive if you book early enough, though this year she hasn’t made any of those. Hasn’t been invited. Nothing has been the same since the week before Nevis started back at Avon University in September. Nevis did not come home at Christmas. They have barely spoken in months.

Need speak now.

The key turns and the van, which she bought second-hand only months after Nevis’s birth, chugs into life. You beauty! Honor pats the dashboard as a thank you, puts the gearstick into first and pulls out of the parking space into the street.

Chapter 3

Nevis