Honor reaches the meeting place half an hour early, edgy and apprehensive, as if, instead of having coffee with her daughter, she’s arriving for a job interview. In a way, she thinks, she is doing exactly that. Whatever she has done to offend Nevis has led Honor to this meeting, here, in this café, with her last £50 in her pocket, feeling as if she is having to reapply for the job of Nevis’s mother. And perhaps she is. Maybe that’s how it always works between young adults and their parents. Or perhaps this is peculiar to adoptions. Sometimes, not often, Honor wonders what it would be like to have had biological children of her own, to be able to see in her offspring, intimations of herself. She might have done, had Zoe not died. Then again, perhaps not. Being Nevis’s adoptive mother has been the greatest privilege of her life. Everything good in Honor’s life has flowed from being Nevis’s mother. Without Nevis she might have remained in the Welsh Marches, hated by the locals and unable to summon the strength to leave. She had left a broken woman and in the society of bargees and boaters, she had discovered the first real peace she had ever known. People had been dizzyingly kind, lending her tools and equipment, bringing round plants and wood for the stove and even, when times were so tough she wasn’t sure that she and Nevis would be able to continue on the water, cooked food and store-cupboard rations. And it was a great gift for Nevis too. For all the damp and freezing winters, the cramped quarters and the constant financial insecurity, growing up in the community of bargees was the greatest experience Honor could ever have bestowed on any child.

She pushes the door of the café open and steps into a warm, cheerful, old-fashioned place. The table in the corner looks cosy and she can see both ways down the street. Odd to be nervous. Silly. Whatever this is between them will pass, won’t it? It has to because, Bill aside, they only really have each other.

At the counter she orders coffee.

‘Anything to eat with that?’ asks the server, a young woman wearing dungarees.