When I was seven, and Lauren was nine, a few years before he moved away, Dad came to pick us up from a birthday party. It was an after-school party for a friend of Lauren’s, and I had been allowed to tag along. Dad had been out for a long work lunch, and when he got there, he was wearing sunglasses, and his nose was red, and he was slurring his words a little. A few of the other mothers noticed, and they got together in a huddle, and then told Lauren and me that Millie’s mum would drive us home, and they wouldn’t let Dad take us in the car. Dad was angry, and there was a scene. Not a big scene. He didn’t swear or scream. In fact, he was kind of sweet and charming about it at first. That was his thing—when he was drunk, he was funny and appealing, people tended to like him. But not on this day. The charm didn’t work. He got annoyed, then he got nasty. I could see it in his eyes, the flash of concealed anger. He said they were being over the top, that they were out of line, that we were his kids, he was fine, he’d had a glass of wine with lunch. But the mothers held the line, and when Millie’s mum dropped us at our house, Dad said nothing to her and nothing to Mum. It was like it didn’t happen.

There were so many moments like this that we just absorbed, never mentioned to Mum, never talked about.

I brought that one up to Lauren once, when we were teenagers, and she said she vaguely remembered, maybe. I couldn’t get over that. ‘How can you not remember?’ I said. ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘Of course I remember. I remember that time and all the others. I just don’t want to dwell on any of it.’ ‘Dwelling is healthy,’ I assured her. She didn’t think so.

So, we don’t talk about it.

At 4 pm, Dad messages me to say that he has made a booking at a restaurant on the other side of the city. An upscale, expensive steak house, the kind of place that has $55 steaks and their accompanying sauces on the menu and nothing else, the kind of place I definitely can’t afford and will be difficult to get to and doesn’t really fit with my complicated relationship with red meat (I don’t eat it except when I’m craving a burger or a cheap sausage in bread). But there is a plan at least. An inconvenient, annoying plan, but a plan nonetheless. I need to look on the bright side, to manifest a positive outcome. I imagine Dad and me laughing over hunks of meat.