A person less prepared for the role of adoptive mother to a three-month-old baby would have been hard to imagine. Honor had only begun to wash her hair regularly the year before and was still squeezing her pimples. Her parents, Jim and Tillie, had been too busy getting off their heads to worry about teaching their child to wash. Honor was a hippy kid, left, more or less, to fend for herself. She learned how to open a can of beans not long after she learned to walk, but it was only a month after she became Nevis’s mother, via the chance remark of a social worker who had come to see how ‘mum and baby’ were settling down, that she discovered that washing behind your ears was considered an essential part of basic grooming. It was a steep learning curve and she had been forced to scale it while grieving for her friend. Bringing up Nevis had been the best, the most joyful and the worst and the most terrible, thing she had ever done. For the most part, it was done. Or had been, until the incident on the bridge brought into stark relief just how vulnerable Nevis is and how much mothering there is still left to do.

She spots her daughter moments before she enters, alerted by the long shadow and the sloping, lilting walk. Moments later Nevis has spotted her and is approaching.

‘Hi. Is that new?’ Nevis says, pointing to the fleece. She looks even more anxious than she did on Sunday night.

‘Yeah, I mean, not new, but…’

‘…new to you, which is as new as anything gets in your world.’

Oh, she thinks, with sinking heart, so it’s going to be like this, is it?

‘I’ll go and get a coffee. You want another?’

Honor holds her hand over her mug. ‘No, darling, thank you.’

At the word ‘darling’ Nevis blinks and a fragile, awkward smile appears. You can’t bring up the rift or hurt or whatever it is, Honor says to herself, watching her daughter’s back move towards the counter, not unless it’s what Nevis has come to talk about. It wouldn’t be fair, not now. So you must talk about anything else.

In a few moments Nevis returns carrying a cup and takes a seat opposite her mother.

‘How is Satnam?’

‘I assume she’s the same. The student welfare office said they’d let me know if there was any big change,’ Nevis says, rubbing her right eye with her fingers.

‘You look a bit tired.’

‘My sleep app says I slept six hours and eighteen minutes, so I’m fine, just, you know…’ She takes a breath. ‘I don’t need you to be here, you know that don’t you?’