Geraldine said, ‘So she knows you’re here at the hospital, and she’d like to see you. I can get special dispensation for you from the ward, if you’d like.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘But you don’t have to, Anna. It’s up to you.’

‘Okay. I’m not sure . . . I’ll have to think about it.’

Geraldine smiled sympathetically at me. ‘You and your dad must have been carrying this for a long time.’

Tears came to my eyes and for a moment I couldn’t speak. Images of my mother in various modes of drunkenness and illness scrolled through my mind, but now they were overlaid with other images; an old photo of a little girl with a gorgeous little brother in her arms, an ordinary teenager putting posters on her wall and, most heartbreakingly, the image from inside my own head: the fear and desolation in her eyes as her own father turned on her and attacked her.

She had kept that from me. All of it. She had kept it all from her own daughter. How awful must that have been for her? It had been awful for me.

She deserved something different. She deserved a second chance.

Mum’s voice was croaky. Before I entered the room the ward nurse had explained to me that her vocal cords were bruised. He gave me a hydrating icy pole to take in to her. ‘She’s tolerating those okay,’ he said. ‘See if you can get her to have the whole thing.’

‘Anna,’ Mum said, sitting up against the pillows and taking the icy pole as I offered it.

‘You’re supposed to have all of that,’ I said.

‘Yeah, he’s a total icy pole pusher, that one,’ Mum croaked. She crunched the top off it and swallowed painfully and then looked down at the bite mark she had made in it. ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said.

I nodded but I didn’t speak, afraid of something – of either stuffing this up or making everything too easy for her.

‘First, I want you to know that I don’t think it was okay. The way I treated Nassim. Of course I don’t. I treated you, both of you, very badly. I was wrong. I couldn’t be more sorry. I let you down. When I saw you, it was Leonie and Danny all over again. When I just couldn’t do anything –’

I felt the old rise of exasperation. ‘No. You’re making excuses.’

‘Anna, I –’

‘And you say “of course” like I should know that, Mum. But it’s not the first time you’ve let me down. That one time wasn’t the only problem, it was just the last straw. And it wasn’t the only reason I was leaving. I was leaving because I can’t deal anymore with . . .’ Even now I had to push myself to say it, to speak openly about it. ‘With your drinking.’

Mum fiddled with the plastic wrapper of the icy pole where she held it resting on the white sheet folded primly across her lap. ‘I know, Anna.’