And from that point on nothing broke the silence. We dosey-doed around each other in the house, neither one meeting the other’s eye, Mum too full of shame, me too full of anger. Pizza arrived that night, and Chinese the next, already paid for. Dad called us each, separately, on our mobiles. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he said. But I wouldn’t budge.

Mum finally tried again late on the second night, the night before leaving for New Zealand. She caught my eye in the hallway and said, ‘Anna, I need to tell you something,’ but I closed my bedroom door as quickly as I could and waited for an hour before venturing out to brush my teeth.

And then on the third morning I got up to find my parents’ bedroom door standing wide open, the room neat and empty, and Mum’s New Zealand itinerary pinned on the fridge. And I had a sudden sense of something passing me by, like a great weight crossing so close to me that I felt the pull of the tide lurching in my blood. But mostly I felt the relief of her being gone, and of two whole weeks stretching out in front of me with nothing in them but studying hard at home and hanging out with Nassim.

I brewed coffee and while the machine hummed and dribbled brown liquid into a glass, I leaned my elbows on the bench and rested my head in my hands. I heated milk in another cup in the microwave and poured it into the coffee glass and sat at the bench. Again, the strange lurch in my blood, like a weight passing close. The smell of the coffee sat uneasily in my nose, giving me a strange rising sensation in my throat that subsided just as quickly as it had come. I pushed the cup aside – what was this? Anxiety?

On the other side of the room a thick pile of newspapers was bundled up in the recycling, ready for me to put out during the week, and there, near the bottom, pushed right in between the pages of the thickest wad, I saw the corner of an envelope poking out. I got to my feet and pulled it out. It was the letter my mother had been holding that night. I sat at the kitchen bench and opened it.

My Cathy

I caught my breath. Your loving mother, Bette.

My grandmother. It was shocking to see her name there, written in her own hand, a shaky script. Bette. It was my Grandma Bette. Bette was almost a mythical creature. I’d forgotten that she even existed. Bette and my grandfather Hessel. Cathy never mentioned them, it was Dad who had told me their names.

‘We’re just not that kind of family,’ my mother had said once, early on, when I had asked why we never saw them.

How could Mum, after reading this letter, have ignored it? Because she’s Mum, I thought. That’s what she does – she doesn’t care about the people she should. She only cares about herself and her ambition. She had read this letter and she had ignored it and stepped on a plane to New Zealand anyway. How could she have done that? The thought filled me with a kind of horror that she could have just separated herself from her family like that. She was an only daughter, like me, and she had chosen to wander off unattached into the universe, to leave the two people who would have knitted her to the earth, to community, to the world – to just lose them.