It was strange sharing her old bedroom with her little girl, and yet somehow the most natural thing in the world. She would tell her about her own teenage years, how she’d spent hours in there with Aunty Lana and Aunty Judith, sharing secrets, laughing, whispering, quarrelling. And the comfort this gave her was huge. And every now and again she’d go to see a doctor – the locum at their practice (She must talk to Sol about a permanent replacement for him now – Oh no, she couldn’t do that because Sol wasn’t there any more) – yes, the locum, she was sweet. Alice, her name was, soft-voiced and kind-hearted, graduated from Cardiff too, but several years younger than Catrin. And Alice prescribed some lovely anti-depressants, and sent her off to a group every week where she sat on a plastic orange chair in a room full of sad people like her and they’d cry and talk about the dead people they’d known, but then one day she made the mistake of saying that the dead people were all just cadavers really, and the others didn’t like that, so it was suggested that she didn’t come again.

Lana thought this was hilarious – ‘You’ve been kicked out of a self-help group for the bereaved! And you were always such a goody two-shoes in groups! Recorder group and guitar with Mrs Dent and netball and chess – you were always the good girl, Catrin, you never got kicked out!’

And she’d smiled at Lana, even though she didn’t really know what she was talking about. It was like Lana was speaking in French or something.

So when did things begin to change? Was there a defining moment when her grief decided, like some sort of nomadic chief, to move on to the next stage in the process? To find a less painful bit of land on which to subsist? Elisabeth Kübler-Ross – the five stages of grief. That’s right. She remembered it from her college days. But for the life of her she couldn’t recall what the stages were … was one of them anger, maybe? She didn’t feel anger. How could she feel angry towards poor Sol? He’s a cadaver now, she thought again, and imagined him in the ground and how decayed his body would be two months on, without the help of formaldehyde like poor Gwynnie had had.

No, it was the piece of paper in the silver frame that had done it.

Every week – so she was told – Lana, who lived only half an hour away in Cardiff, had come over to help with the move. Pictures of houses at first. Houses she’d take her and Romy to look at, saying, We’re just gonna rent somewhere first, babe, OK? You can think about buying when you’re in a better place … And they’d gone in Lana’s car, sometimes with her parents too, to look at all sorts of possibilities – cottages and flats and new-builds and old-builds – and she would smile at them all, whilst Lana talked to the lady or Huw talked to the man and Romy would run into all the rooms, treating it like one big adventure. And she would smile throughout it all, until at last she must have shown a scintilla more interest in one place than the others, and she said yes, and Romy said yes, and Lana reminded her that it was only for six months and then they could think again.