And Catrin couldn’t speak, unintentionally isolating Lana even more.

She just wanted a hug really.

Occasionally at the Kelly house during the past week she’d encountered Judith, who had continued to treat her with polite disdain. Even in these circumstances. Christ!

But so be it. Lana had no energy left to persuade her to change. And none of it seemed to matter any more anyway.

Every day she’d head to the Kellys’, where Catrin and Romy clung to each other in the eye of the raging grief storm, preparing for Sol’s funeral to come at them over the hill. It was all too, too grim to consider. She drifted into the house, awash with sadness and Liz Kelly’s constant cups of tea and relentless supply of cake. Lana couldn’t touch any of it. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. She was surviving on black coffee, cigarettes and gin. People wandered aimlessly in and out and around the house, muttering sorrowful, pointless exchanges.

She looked in on Catrin every day. At least twice. Just lying there in her old bedroom with Romy, her tears dried up, lost for words. Mute and on pause.

Between them all, they somehow persuaded her to wash every day, to eat at least a slice of toast, and to wander into the garden for a few lungfuls of fresh air. They were just keeping her alive really, like a feeble plant, carrying her from the pillar of Sol’s death to the post of his funeral service. There were other practicalities to achieve, such as taking Romy out of the house for a change of scene, or going to the chemist for Catrin’s sleeping pills and other meds.

That afternoon, Lana had volunteered to go to the shops. Liz needed more bread and milk. In order to function. In order to keep her daughter alive with eternal cups of tea. Not long before, Judith’s lovely son had turned up with his lovely husband. And Gareth. Not wanting to create any unhelpful awkwardness by being in the same room as him, she’d seized upon the duty of bread-and-milk-buyer in order to get out of the house. ‘I’ll come with you,’ Jack had said. And Lana thought, Why not?

The shop was only five minutes’ walk away, but after they’d bought the groceries, Lana wasn’t ready to return straight away. She was going stir crazy, if truth be told, and she craved a new environment and new faces.

‘Don’t suppose you fancy a quick one in the Crown, do you?’ she asked Jack. ‘You don’t have to, I just—’

‘Yes, please.’

They ended up having two. He was a lovely guy. Sometimes she found herself staring at him, not really listening to his earnest talk about Catrin and what would become of her without Sol.

Jack looked more like Gareth than Jude. Same eyes and the same-shaped mouth. She zoomed in on it now as it formed words, expressions, opinions that she didn’t hear. Snap out of it, Lana, she thought, aware that she was in danger of being destructively nostalgic, allowing Jack to remind her of a younger Gareth; a Gareth with whom she’d once been so intimate. She didn’t want to go there.