I’d never actually told them about my change in circumstances. I kept eating my toast, my face blank.

‘Us? Go to New York?’ said Mum.

Dad reached for a box of tissues and handed them to her. ‘Well, why not? We have savings. You can’t take it with you. The old man knew that at least. Don’t be expecting any expensive bequests, eh, Louisa? I’m frightened to pass the bookie in case he jumps out and says Granddad owes him a fiver.’

Mum straightened up, her cloth in her hand. She looked to one side.

‘You and me and Dad in New York City. Well, wouldn’t that be a thing?’

‘We can look up flights this evening, if you like.’ I wondered, briefly, if I could persuade Margot to say her surname was Gopnik.

Mum put a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh, gracious, listen to me making plans and Granddad not cold in his grave yet. What would he think?’

‘He’d think it was wonderful. Granddad would love the thought of you and Dad coming to America.’

‘You really think so?’

‘I know so.’ I reached across and hugged her. ‘He travelled the world in the navy, didn’t he? And I also know he’d like to think of you starting back at the adult education centre. No point wasting all that knowledge you’ve gained over the past year.’

‘Though I’m also pretty sure he’d like to think you were still leaving me some dinner in the oven before you went,’ said Dad.

‘C’mon, Mum. Just get through today and then we can start planning. You did everything you could for him, and I know Granddad would feel you deserved the next stage of your life to be an adventure.’

‘An adventure,’ Mum mused. She took a tissue from Dad and dabbed at the corner of her eye. ‘How did I raise daughters with so much wisdom, eh?’

Dad raised his eyebrows and, with a deft move, slid the toast off my plate.

‘Ah. Well, that would be the fatherly influence, you see.’ He yelped as Mum flicked her tea-towel at the back of his head and then, as she turned, he smiled at me with a look of utter relief.

The funeral passed, as funerals do, with varying degrees of sadness, some tears, and a sizeable percentage of the congregation wishing they knew the tunes to the hymns. It was not an excessive gathering, as the priest put it politely. Granddad had ventured out so rarely by the end that few of his friends even seemed to know that he’d passed, even though Mum had put a notice in the Stortfold Observer. Either that or most of them were dead too (with a couple of the mourners it was quite hard to tell the difference).

At the graveside I stood beside Treena, my jaw tense, and felt a very particular kind of sibling gratitude when her hand crept into mine and squeezed it. I looked behind me to where Eddie was holding Thom’s hand, and he was kicking quietly at a daisy in the grass, perhaps trying not to cry, or perhaps thinking about Transformers or the half-eaten biscuit he had wedged into the upholstery of the funeral car.

I heard the priest murmur the familiar recitation about dust and ashes and my eyes filled with tears. I wiped them away with a handkerchief. And then I looked up, and across the grave at the back of the small throng of mourners stood Sam. My heart lurched. I felt a hot flush, somewhere between fear and nausea. I caught his eye briefly through the crowd, blinked hard and looked away. When I looked back, he had gone.

I was at the buffet at the pub when I turned to find him beside me. I had never seen him in a suit and the sight of him looking both so handsome and so unfamiliar briefly knocked my breath from my chest. I decided to handle the situation in as mature a way as possible and simply refused to acknowledge his presence, peering intently instead at the plates of sandwiches, in the manner of someone who had only recently been introduced to the concept of food.

He stood there, perhaps waiting for me to look up, and then said softly, ‘I’m sorry about your granddad. I know what a close family you are.’

‘Not that close, clearly, or I would have been here.’ I busied myself arranging the napkins on the table, even though Mum had paid for waiting staff.

‘Yes, well, life doesn’t always work like that.’

‘So I’ve gathered.’ I closed my eyes briefly, trying to remove the spike from my voice. I took a breath, then finally looked up at him, my face arranged carefully into something neutral. ‘So how are you?’

‘Not bad, thanks. You?’

‘Oh. Fine.’

We stood for a moment.

‘How’s your house?’

‘Coming on. Moving in next month.’

‘Wow.’ I was briefly startled from my discomfort. It seemed improbable to me that someone I knew could build a house from nothing. I had seen it when it was just a patch of concrete on the ground. And yet he had done it. ‘That’s – that’s amazing.’

‘I know. I’ll miss the old railway carriage, though. I quite liked being in there. Life was … simple.’

We looked at each other, then away.

‘How’s Katie?’

The faintest of pauses. ‘She’s fine.’

My mother appeared at my shoulder with a tray of sausage rolls. ‘Lou, sweetheart, would you see where Treen is? She was going to hand these round for me – oh, there she is. Perhaps you could take them to her. There’s people over there haven’t had anything to eat ye–’ She suddenly grasped who I was talking to. She snatched the tray away from me. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.’

‘You weren’t,’ I said, slightly more emphatically than I’d intended. I took hold of the tray’s edge.

‘I’ll do it, love,’ she said, pulling it towards her waist.

‘I can do it.’ I held tight, my knuckles glowing white.

‘Lou. Let. Go,’ she said firmly. Her eyes burnt into mine. I finally relinquished my grip and she hurried away.

Sam and I stood by the table. We smiled awkwardly at each other but the smiles fell away too quickly. I picked up a plate and put a carrot stick on it. I wasn’t sure I could eat anything but it seemed odd to stand there with an empty plate.

‘So. Are you back for long?’

‘Just a week.’

‘How’s life treating you over there?’

‘It’s been interesting. I got the sack.’

‘Lily told me. I see a fair bit of her now with the whole Jake thing.’

‘Yeah, that was … surprising.’ I wondered briefly what Lily had told him about her visit.

‘Not to me. I could see it from the first time they met. You know, she’s great. They’re happy.’

I nodded, as if in agreement.

‘She talks a lot. About your amazing boyfriend and how you picked yourself up after the firing thing and found another place to live and your job at that Vintage Clothes Emporium.’ He was apparently as fascinated as I was by the cheese straws. ‘You got it all sorted, then. She’s in awe of you.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘She said New York suits you.’ He shrugged. ‘But I guess we both knew that.’

I snuck a look at him while his gaze was elsewhere, marvelling with the small part of me that wasn’t actually dying that two people who were once so comfortable with each other could now barely work out how to string a sentence together in conversation.

‘I have something for you. In my room at home,’ I said abruptly. I wasn’t entirely sure where it came from. ‘I brought it back last time but … you know.’