I thought about it for a long time, resting a hand on Cassie’s head, which for once she didn’t shrug off. ‘There is a way we can help him, darling.’ And so I’d told her. I’d tried to make the liver donation sound awful, painful and bloody, but I’d forgotten who I was dealing with. Cassie, who, when she’d sliced her toe to the bone as a child, wading into the sea where some idiot had smashed a beer bottle, had set her chin in determination. Mummy, it doesn’t hurt. Although it must have, a lot. It seemed this news had lifted her from the slump she’d been in since Mike was injured. Cassie was fifteen. She’d had a sheltered life until now. The chance to be part of the drama, to gain a scar, maybe even atone for her suspension from school, for saying she hated her father – of course she’d take it. I’d handled this all wrong.

‘Dad wouldn’t want you to.’

She gave me that look, like I was the most stupid person in the world. ‘He wouldn’t want me to save his life? Sure, he’d rather just die, never see me or Benji again.’ She made a loud noise. ‘Benji. Christ, what would I tell him? He’d never forgive me if I could save Dad and I didn’t!’

‘It’s not as simple as that!’ I was getting angry with her too, with the US-teen-soap way she saw the world. Where everything was a story, where you offered a sacrifice and it actually made any difference at all. ‘It doesn’t always work, his body might reject it, and you might not be a match anyway . . .’

‘But we can find out! We have to at least find out!’

‘You could get sick too—’

She made the noise again. Half-anguish, and half a kind of fevered excitement. ‘Mum!’ I tried to understand how she was feeling. The loss of control that I did – all these things happening, Mike arrested then almost dying, Jake in prison, Karen weeping and bloodied, her own nude picture shared around school – but worse, because she was a kid in a woman’s skin, who couldn’t even vote or drive or drink. The rage that must have been in her, with nowhere to go, like a body hurtling forward in a car crash, stopping fast against a wall. ‘We can find out! I’m going to find out. You can’t stop me. You just said that we won’t ever know what happened unless he wakes up – he has to wake up!’

I could stop her, of course, it was just bravado of Cassie to say that. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t take this away from her. ‘Alright. We’ll get the test.’