At times she could barely remember being the girl who had once known what she wanted to do with all the life that was in front of her. Or rather, she could recall the memories, but they felt like they had belonged to someone else. She felt utterly disconnected from that person, as though she had died too and now Jasmine was this other being who only shared her past, not her path to the future. In this respect, she believed bereavement must be easier if you had a job, a career, a husband and kids, as all those clichés about life going on would apply. There would be a template for how to spend your days: commitments and obligations to supersede the desire to pull the covers back over your head and stay in bed for ever. You’d know what to do, even if you didn’t much feel like doing it.

She didn’t have a life yet. There was no saddle for her to get back into.

Jasmine had just started her final year at drama college when Mum got her shocking, unreal diagnosis. Pancreatic cancer: late-presenting, fast-spreading.

Jasmine never knew her father. He had died when she was just a baby, and her mum had never married, never even lived with anyone else. They only had each other, and suddenly they only had months left together.

Jasmine dropped out. She had to move back in with Mum in Edinburgh, had to be close, had to be home. She didn’t think about her education or her ambitions. They became instantly irrelevant, abandoned as unnecessary baggage she could not afford to carry on this most arduous of journeys.

When she contemplated them again, after Mum was gone, it was like happening upon a box of toys that had meant a world of pleasure and possibility to her as a child, but held no appeal to an adult harshly schooled in the realities of the world. The same strangeness had assailed her when she re-entered her flat back in Glasgow, the trappings of the existence she had suddenly suspended all still right where she left them: the Mary Celeste two flights up on Victoria Road.