‘He’s gone. He was only visiting! We have to manage on our own now, so I need you to be a grown-up boy and get dressed for school, OK?’

‘But Bill makes eggs.’

‘Benji! Now isn’t the time for the spoiled little brat routine, OK? Make yourself cereal. You’re ten years old, for God’s sake – I was cooking dinner at that age.’ A small exaggeration – at the most I’d heated spaghetti hoops – but I was sickened with myself for making my kids so dependent, so lacking in resilience. And me too. After my childhood, you’d think I would have been prepared for hard times. I’d been spoiled, and blind.

I got up, knotting my towelling robe around me, bundling my hair above my head. What had I been playing at, wafting around Bill in perfume and silk? It was pathetic. We had things to do. I hammered on Cassie’s door. ‘Get up!’

‘I’m suspended!’ she yelled. ‘Why would I get up?’

‘Because, we have to go to the hospital. And you’re going to study. You’ll be taking those exams, sooner or later.’

Benji had followed me out into the hallway, bewildered at the loss of Nice Mummy. ‘Mum, it’s not fair!’

I could feel the phrase rise in my throat, and I leaned into it. ‘Life’s not fair. Now stop whining and get your uniform on.’ And it felt good, to yell at my children, to stop treating them with kid gloves. This was the real world, and it was time they learned about it.

‘I’m so sorry. Cassie isn’t a match.’ There it was again, that doctor’s sorry. Sorry-not-sorry, as Cassie and her friends would say, with the cruelty of teenage girls. Cassie was crying again, a harsh sobbing sound coming out of her mouth, her hand pressed in front of it but doing nothing to keep the noise in. The doctor had to raise her voice over the din. ‘. . . We’d have had to go to court anyway to get the permission so it was a long shot . . . he’ll go on the transplant list now. There’s always the chance of altruistic donation and . . .’

‘How long does that take? Waiting for a donor?’ I was watching Cassie from the corner of my eye, the way she was doubled over. The front of her white polka-dot top was already wet. She loved her father, despite what he’d done, despite declaring she hoped he went to prison. I’d forgotten what that could feel like, the kind of love that isn’t even dented no matter what someone does to you. The kind that, it turned out, I did not have for Mike.

‘Four years is the average.’

‘Four years? Can he . . .’ Could Mike survive that?