He paused for a moment, then said, ‘Hey, I wonder if you’ve met your Uncle Solomon yet? Ha! Listen to me – I’m meant to be an atheist!’ He smiled and imagined Georgia’s sweet little spirit dancing around him and laughing. ‘And your brother’s baby is due any day now. They’re calling her Ivy ’cos of, y’know, Christmas. She’d have been your niece. Weird that, isn’t it? – Aunty Georgia.’ And he paused to catch his breath.

He rarely cried during these visits, especially during recent years, but it was the reaching and passing of a milestone that often tripped him up: the realization that here was yet another event or accomplishment that Georgia had missed.

‘I love you still,’ he whispered. ‘Whether you can hear me or no.’ And he kissed his cold fingers before touching the letters of his daughter’s name engraved upon the headstone. ‘Happy Christmas, sweetheart.’ It was stupid, he knew that. He was just kissing a piece of stone. But he always found it comforting.

‘Gareth?’ The voice interrupted his reverie. ‘Is that you?’

He turned around to see the woman he’d noticed earlier at Solomon’s graveside. She’d removed the sunglasses.

He sighed.

‘Lana.’

Gareth’s thirty-year-old resentment against Lana had become part of his life’s familiar landscape. It no longer burned away at him in the way it once did, and he’d grown accustomed to living with it – rarely did a day go by without his thinking about the blame he would always feel towards her.

But after Sol’s death it had become increasingly difficult for Gareth to pretend that Lana didn’t exist, and even more so to justify his determination never to forgive her.

What no one realized – and what he could barely admit even to himself – was that he wanted to hold on to that blame.

Because it gave him an actual reason for Georgia dying.

Because if her death wasn’t caused by Lana pushing Judith at Catrin’s wedding, if it really was just an inexplicable, unfortunate accident, then he didn’t think he could live with it. He found the whole idea suffocating. Just one of those things, a doctor had told him, and he’d wanted to punch their lights out. No. His daughter died because Judith’s bitch of a friend had pushed her over when she was pregnant.

And he’d turned this belief into fact. And the fact had become darkly reassuring. There was a reason for Georgia’s death. And if he were to forgive Lana, then surely this reason would disintegrate.

It helped, of course, that he usually only saw her once a year, and even then from a distance and amongst a crowd of party guests. Because absence makes the blame grow stronger, enhances the myth, makes it all the more manageable. But certainly since Sol’s funeral, Lana Lloyd – or whatever her surname was these days – had started creeping back into his mind. Without even trying, she’d made her unwelcome presence very much felt.

And now here she was, standing before him in her expensive winter coat. How strange it felt, to not be shocked. As if he’d been expecting to see her.