The anger that had been radiating from him just a moment ago seemed to drift away like smoke from a fired gun. It was as if he had been an actor playing a part on a stage. Now he appeared to shrink. He shuffled across to help himself to a beer, shoulders hunched and eyes low. Had he been crying? Grace wondered. Despite the new norms of the modern age in which they were living, the thought of a grown man in tears could still move her deeply. The men occupying Hector’s world of boarding school and business suits never cried.

Grace would do anything to make this better for her son, but there was nothing within her power that might help other than to be there and listen whilst the pieces of what he had discovered slowly slotted into place for him. Who knew how long that might take?

‘Come and sit here with me,’ she said gently, patting the sofa next to her.

Hector looked reluctant for a moment, then let out a huge sigh and slumped on to the cushions next to her. He really was completely broken, Grace thought. All the life had gone from his handsome face and there were more fine lines around his eyes than she had ever noticed before.

‘I know this is all very hard to take in,’ Grace began, stroking his big shoulder gently. ‘But you’ll get there in the end. You just need to give yourself time.’

Hector raised his eyebrows at her, clearly incredulous that he would ever be able to deal with it, or would want to. His eyes were filled with hurt.

‘The only person that has done anything wrong here is your father,’ Grace continued. ‘And he isn’t here to defend himself, so we will never know what was going on in his head. Knowing him as I did, I would say that he got himself into something that seemed thrilling and exciting to start with and then, before he knew it, he was in too deep to get out of it.’

‘But how could he do that to me?’ Hector asked.

Grace noted the personal pronoun, but let it go. ‘I’m sure he didn’t intend to hurt anyone,’ she said. ‘He probably thought that he could look after all of us. I mean, he could just have abandoned Melissa when she got pregnant, but he didn’t – well, not then, anyway. He constructed that elaborate web of lies around himself and he made it work for nearly twenty years. As far as I can gather, he only left Melissa when she found out what he’d done and there was a danger of her reporting him to the police. He’d have known that the scandal would have been unfair on us and also very hard to recover from. So at least he did that for us.’