‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ Mike had bought Benji a rod for Christmas but still not found time to take him to the small stream that ran past the side of the garden. I didn’t think Mike actually knew how to fish, but Bill would. Even at university I remembered him catching a frightened grey tiddler off the back of a punt, using a prawn sandwich as bait. We threw it back, but I still remembered the thrill of it spasming on the wooden deck, Karen and Jodi and I screeching girlishly. Bill with the joint hanging from his mouth, always so cool but even him smiling a little, proud and surprised.

Benji snapped off the iPad and stood up from the kitchen table. ‘I’ll tidy my room then. I mean, tidy it better.’

I pulled him under my arm in a bear hug; he smelled of biscuits and shampoo. Not yet like a teenager, of feet and resentment, and that reminded me Jake would be here soon, that I had to think of things to talk to him about, a way in to the impenetrable teenager he’d become. Find out what he might like for his eighteenth birthday, fast approaching. At least I still had Benji for a few more years. ‘You’re a good boy.’

‘Urgh, Mum.’ But he hugged back. ‘Where’s Cassie?’

‘Town.’ I’d asked her to buy another candle and she still wasn’t home. Soup, bread, herbs for tagine, wine out to breathe . . .

‘Bet she’s with Aaron.’

‘Well, maybe they had homework . . .’

‘They’re not in the same class, Mum.’ No, because Cassie’s boyfriend was in the Oxbridge stream and she hadn’t made it, and Mike and I were pretending it was totally fine, not an issue at all. A cloud of extra worries burst around my head like flies – how much time Cassie was spending with Aaron, what they got up to in that time, what if something had happened to her to make her late – and then the back door of the house, the one that led into the woods, slammed and she was here.

‘Cassie?’

She sloped into the kitchen, and I noted how short her skirt was, how tight her vest top. ‘What?’

She had a red mark on the side of her neck. Behind her in the hall, I saw someone – her boyfriend, Aaron. So tall already his head almost knocked into the antique chandelier I’d hung in the hallway. ‘Hello, Aaron.’

‘Hello, Mrs Morris.’ He had lovely manners – of course he did. Just like his grades and his sporting ability and his clean, blonde good looks. I worried for Cassie, with a boy like this. A boy who already knew he could have anything he wanted in life.

‘How’s school?’

‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘Busy with exams. I’m going home to study now, in fact.’