The Night We Met

Also by Zoë Folbigg

The Note

The Distance

The Postcard

THE NIGHT WE MET

Zoë Folbigg

AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

www.ariafiction.com

This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Zoë Folbigg, 2021

The moral right of Zoë Folbigg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN:

Paperback: 9781838930691

eBook: 9781789542141

Cover design © Leah Jacobs-Gordon

Aria

c/o Head of Zeus

First Floor East

5–8 Hardwick Street

London EC1R 4RG

www.ariafiction.com

For Doc

Contents

Welcome Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Two

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Part Three

Chapter Fifty-One

Epilogue

Loved The Night We Met? Then read on for a sneak peak of The Distance…

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Acknowledgements (TK)

About the Author

Become an Aria Addict

Part One

One

September 2018

Cambridgeshire, England

‘Olivia Messina’, said the red writing on a white board, above a pillow strewn in billowing hair. The script was fat, as if the magic marker had been lumbered upon with a heavy arm and a carefree hand as it pressed against the wall-mounted board. Fibres splayed. The jovial cursive script said more about the nurse who wrote it than the patient in the bed. The jolly writing didn’t say that Olivia Messina was dying.

Cables and tubes went into veins and came out of cannulas. A machine beeped. A drip hung from a stand. A small rectangular bag poked out of the sheets from halfway down the side of the bed, its contents the same sepia shade as Olivia’s freckles. Her husband Daniel tried not to look at the bag, he didn’t like to think about how it was attached to his wife with a catheter. He didn’t like to think about how dehydrated she was. The bag revealed too much. That time might be running out. Daniel didn’t want to consider that, not when he was working so hard to find a solution.

A Glaswegian nurse called Fraser, a stout man with grey eyebrows and a dour charm, wearing a white tunic and a weathered smile, pushed his trolley full of pills and potions onto the ward. The squeak of four small wheels, under the weight of remedies and responsibility, announced his arrival. The cart creaked rhythmically as Fraser pushed it from its back end like an upright piano he didn’t mind bumping. Bottles, scales, notebooks and clipboards hung from the trolley’s ledges and edges, recording the inventory of his medicinal comings and goings. He gave Daniel and Olivia a nod as he passed her bed, noting the newspaper on Daniel’s lap.

‘Evening squire,’ Fraser said. ‘Don’t read me that match report, will ya? I can’t relive it.’

‘Evening Fraser,’ Daniel nodded back, while the crumpled sports section fell in a whisper to the floor. ‘Shall I read you the Liverpool one instead? Mané and Firmino. Two beauties…’

‘Get outta here!’ Fraser said as he rolled his eyes.

Of all the consultants, nurses, radiographers and carers the family had met in the past – hideous – year, Daniel liked this apothecary the best. He wasn’t quite sure why; they had come across some amazing medics along the journey from Ibiza to Addenbrooke’s via Queen Square in London – but Fraser had a certain no-nonsense wit about him, an honesty to his compassion.

He didn’t cock his head to one side when he asked Olivia how she was. He looked her straight in the eye, with the acerbic sparkle of his. He had pathos and patience, and talked to Olivia as a woman, not a cancer patient. His broad shoulders looked like they could weather anything for the Messina Bleeker family, that he would dig out his old boxing gloves and fight the fight for them, if only he could.

Fraser was a challenge to comprehend, but when Daniel could translate his thick Glaswegian tones and keep up with the fast and industrious pace at which he spoke, both men would come alive in conversation about politics, Brexit and sport. Fraser loved that Daniel knew as much about Scottish football as he; and he liked to jibe him for being one of those southern Liverpool fans.

‘I was born in the shadows of Firhill Stadium you know,’ Fraser told Daniel about his beloved Partick Thistle.

‘I supported Liverpool through thick and thin,’ Daniel would counter. ‘Not just the Eighties.’

‘Ach, gauen yersel!’ Fraser would reply with a ruffian’s smirk.

Fraser was solid, reliable, always dishing out pills at regular intervals, and the squeaking of his wheels brought respite and cheer from the turgid beeping of machines.

*

‘I’ll be back to see you in a bit, Botticelli,’ Fraser said to Olivia with a wry smile. She closed her eyes. He had nicknames for all the patients. Portland Bill. Posh Spice. Agatha Christie. The Don. He called Olivia ‘Botticelli’ because her Renaissance-red hair reminded him of an Italian masterpiece. ‘Just goin to see The Diva over there,’ he said, as he clicked his pen and tucked it into his tunic pocket. Daniel picked the sports pages up from the floor and Fraser shook his head.

‘Should never have been a goal,’ he muttered under his breath, as he unlocked the brake and continued to the woman at the end of the ward with brown skin, high cheekbones and a black and gold turban.

Daniel waved languidly as Fraser dished out his pilules and potions to the woman with one breast.

Olivia turned her head slowly, across the plump pillow it was slumped on, to look at Daniel. He gazed back like a tired and adoring child and mentally noted how Olivia looked both young and old. The mole at the end of her lip; her rich olive skin; the cascade of hair – they usually made her look youthful and vibrant. But her skin was paper-thin and pale, wrinkled beyond the laughter lines. Today she looked ten years older than she was.

She squeezed Daniel’s hand.

‘We’ve hit rock bottom huh?’ she said thoughtfully, the once flame-freckled lids of her eyes closing and opening in slow blinks.

Daniel smiled, sat up and rearranged Olivia’s hair so she didn’t get hot. The open window enabled air to channel through the propped doors of the ward, but it was warm, the tail end of summer making both their brows bead with a slight sweat. He pushed her hair back off her face.

Rock bottom.

It had been a long time since Daniel first heard Olivia say that, but he sighed and smiled, awash with relief, to see a spark of humour.

She remembers.

Although English was Olivia’s mother’s mother tongue, Olivia grew up in Italy with English as a second language. Despite her fluency, she sometimes got things wrong – much to the amusement of Daniel and their daughters.

‘Budgie up!’ Olivia would say if she wanted to squeeze in on the sofa.

‘It’s a doggy dog world,’ she would tell Flora, if she didn’t get the part she wanted in the school play.

‘Don’t pop your clocks,’ she would snap, when she wanted someone to calm down.

Rock bottom.

‘This isn’t rock bottom, my love,’ Daniel said. His face handsome and earnest. ‘Look around you, all this brilliant treatment! Not just Fraser and his wagon. The research Mimi is doing. The diet I’ve got everything ready for at home. I’ve been juicing like a bastard – even Flora liked the spinach and apple one I made yesterday. This is just the start.’

Olivia looked at Daniel with the same comforting smile she gave their youngest daughter Sofia, and stroked the hair on his forearm with her bony hand.

‘Crazy, sexy juicing or whatever it’s called isn’t going to help me Daniel. You need to accept it.’

He swallowed.

‘Don’t be so negative. Elisabeth, at work – the health editor – she forwarded me something about a study in Nature. Some experimental drug that can inhibit cells from spread—’

A slight woman with lighter red hair, in a soft basin-like style, walked back into the ward to Olivia’s bed by the open doors.

‘Got them!’ she interrupted, thrusting a notebook and pen into the air.

‘It’s called AMD 3100 apparently…’ Daniel added in hushed tones, quickly trying to sneak it in, so Olivia knew about the breakthrough but his mother-in-law wouldn’t get carried away before he’d had the chance to do more research.

Olivia looked at her mother and smiled gratefully, her prettiest of noses crinkling at the bridge. She looked more galvanised by the pen and notepad Nancy had just brought her, more eager to prop herself on her pillow and sit up, than she was by talk of miracle cures, curative juices and new drug cocktails Daniel had been trying to drop into conversation.

Nancy put the pen and notepad on the thin wooden table that lay across the bed and gestured to Olivia to sit forward.

‘There you go, love,’ she said as she plumped up the crisp pillows. Nancy was both matronly and warm, a small woman in mustard trousers and a burgundy shirt, a thin silk scarf tied around her pale, wrinkled neck, despite the warm evening.

‘It’s not for me!’ Olivia laughed wanly. ‘It’s for him!’ She gestured to Daniel. ‘The pen and notepad.’

‘Oh, I thought you wanted it,’ Nancy said, puzzled. ‘For lists and things.’ Her Edinburgh accent was soft and rolling, and so different to Fraser’s.

‘No, it’s for Daniel.’

‘For me?’ Daniel rubbed his eyes and tried to hide his sleepiness. He wasn’t the one in hospital. ‘I’ve got my laptop!’

Olivia nodded, her hair tumbling, and some colour seemed to capture across her cheeks again, excited by the prospect of her idea.

‘For you! A separate journal. So you can write our story. For the girls. I always wanted to tell them our story. You know, properly.’

‘Our story?’

Daniel looked from Nancy to Olivia in bewilderment. ‘You can tell the girls our story.’

‘No I can’t. I don’t have time.’

Two

Nancy stopped plumping up the pillows behind her daughter’s head and froze.

‘I’ll go refill that water jug,’ she said, fussing and distracting herself from the water welling up in her eyes.

Olivia and Daniel watched Nancy walk into the corridor with the half-empty Britax jug, her gaze firmly on the nurses’ station ahead of her, the cooler next to it with its blue button offering the cold water Olivia preferred. Nancy liked to keep busy.

Daniel frowned, his dark brows lowering over soft, khaki-coloured eyes.

‘You do! I’m going to get us more time.’

‘With what, spinach and apple juice?!’ Olivia had a mutinous look, but she tried to go easy on Daniel. ‘Really Dan—’

‘But I read a case study of one woman in Albuquerque or somewhere, she had it worse than you and they trialled this drug on her, plus changing her—’

‘Daniel!’ Olivia shot. Silencing him as she always could.

Nancy walked back in with the water jug as Fraser finished tending to Dionne, who was far from a diva in her silent curtained chamber. The caustic colour of his pale eyes brightened a little.

‘Ah! Lady Spencer!’ Fraser smiled.

‘Good evening Fraser,’ Nancy replied.

Fraser nodded to Olivia. ‘I’ll be back in a wee while with your Keppra meds, just heading to the men’s ward, see what those ne’er do wells are up to…’

Nancy looked flustered.

‘I’ll leave you lovebirds to it then,’ Nancy said, a flush in her cheeks. As she said it, she didn’t recall the first time she uttered those words to Olivia and Daniel, at the threshold of a light and bright apartment in a bourgeois district of Milan. Daniel remembered though. He could never forget the feelings of awkwardness and hope – even if he hadn’t just seen them in Fraser. ‘I’d better get back to Maria and the girls, make sure they’re ready for Back To School,’ she said, making her fingers into inverted commas, as if it were a new holiday she didn’t approve of. ‘Honestly, the fuss in town today and having to have new this and new that,’ Nancy wittered, still keeping busy. She re-tied her silk neckerchief and smoothed down her tailored trousers, before kissing Olivia’s cheek and squeezing Daniel’s shoulder.

‘Say hi to Mamma for me,’ Olivia said. Olivia Messina was a curious case of having had two mothers from the day she was born.

‘Of course,’ Nancy replied. ‘She’ll come see you in the morning.’

Olivia smiled.

‘Love you,’ Nancy said, towards the air between them both.

‘See you back at home,’ Daniel answered.

*

Daniel and Olivia looked at each other and almost blushed. Both were struck by the weird sensation of finally being alone and able to talk, as if they had both been taken back to the nerves of the apartment in Milan and this were the first night of the rest of their lives, even though Dionne The Diva was now asleep in her bed behind the curtain.

I’ll leave you lovebirds to it then.

But the giddiness stopped there.

Daniel knew there was a quiet conversation to be resumed.

With a shaky hand, Olivia took a sip of cold water and leaned back on her pillows.

‘Here, let me help.’

‘No, it’s fine.’

The iciness of the cold water relieved her parched mouth but she couldn’t take in much liquid without feeling queasy, so she carefully placed the beaker back on the table. The queasiness had worsened over the past couple of days, making Olivia’s shrinking throat feel even more vulnerable, to gagging, to vomiting, to choking. The basic human function of swallowing was starting to become traumatic. Daniel wanted to tell Olivia about his research – all the brilliant hope he had found – but he knew she wanted to get back to the issue of the pen and notepad on the table. That seemed to excite her more.

‘Listen, I want you to write it up.’

‘Write what up?’

‘Our story.’

‘Really?’ Daniel sighed. He didn’t like this defeatist talk. As if Olivia wouldn’t be able to tell the girls herself. He was working, investigating, researching, day and night, and he was getting closer and closer.

‘Yes! You’re a writer. It’s best coming from you. Write down our love story, from the bottom of the world to the top of the Matterhorn.’

She remembers.

‘It’s a cool story. I want the girls to know it all.’

‘All?’ Daniel raised a playful eyebrow that was quickly pulled back down by red-raw fibres and capillaries coming from his heart. Levers and pulleys, as if his inside was on the outside. He worried Olivia would see through him, see that he really was scared.

‘Why don’t you write it, while you’re stuck in here?’

Daniel realised how clumsy that sounded. Olivia would struggle to hold a pen in a grip, she hadn’t been able to for weeks. ‘I could bring in my old laptop. It works perfectly well. Or your one if you’d prefer.’

‘I can’t, I’m too tired.’ Olivia struggled to swallow and picked up the beaker again. It was a beige sippy cup with the image of a raised bear on its barrel. The vessel had been used by kids with childhood cancers, men after throat surgery and centenarians who had outlived their partners by almost fifty years. Daniel hated the sippy cup. His 43-year-old wife should not be drinking from a sippy cup. ‘And you’re too tired. For now,’ she added, gingerly reaching her arm out to stroke his stubble with the back of her hand. ‘But you have time.’

The blood drained from Daniel’s face and he imagined those bright red capillaries emptying. Time.

Don’t pop your clocks.

He stood up and paced the ward, with a rising anger that made him want to throw the sippy cup and smash it against the equipment. To pull out the cannulas from her hands and rip out the catheter attached to her urinary tract. He was overcome by an urge to unplug every wire and tube and smuggle Olivia out of the room, over his shoulder. He wanted to smash in Fraser’s cart the next time he saw his merry face wheeling it from the back. But he couldn’t do any of these things, so he clasped his hands, fingers splayed, to his face, shook his head to mute his scream, and sat back down.

‘Darling—’ Olivia tried to put a placatory hand on his arm, the way she always did when her floaty charms were calming the demons of Daniel’s more anxious mind. But Daniel shook it off in desperation.

‘How the FUCK—’

‘Shhhhhh, tesoro…’ she persisted.

They both looked over to Dionne’s bay and Daniel lowered his voice. ‘How the fuck do I write anything so significant? I can’t write anything more than a match report. How do I write something that comes anywhere near doing us – doing you – some kind of…’

‘Justice?’ Olivia levelled him with a look. ‘None of this is just, but I want you to write a document. An account. So the girls have more than a sense of injustice. So they have a lovely story. So their memories are more than of their family being at the fruit.’

‘Huh?’

‘Essere alla fruta. Hitting rock bottom.’

Daniel rubbed his eyes with the knuckles of his right hand.

‘I thought we’d been there. I thought we hit rock bottom when we lost Jude.’

Olivia gave a laboured swallow, but said nothing.

‘And we climbed our way out of the bleakness. We can do it again. We’re strong. You’re strong!’

Olivia’s silence spoke volumes; it unnerved Daniel, who carried on, in despair.

‘I dunno, my love. It’s too big. It’s too important. I’m not sure I can.’

Daniel looked away and picked up the rest of the newspaper from where it had fallen and blown, now under the metal bed on wheels, and flattened it on top of the polyester blanket over Olivia’s feet. He pressed it down again in an attempt to neaten it. To make it readable. ‘I just think it’s beyond me.’

Olivia laughed from out of nowhere. A punch of a laugh that took the wind out of her sails and made her rattle. She coughed and swallowed hard again.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Daniel, you’re a writer.’ Her tone was that of a woman telling a man he was being ridiculous. But she wanted to be kind. ‘You’re a father. My lover. My husband. I know you can.’

Daniel felt all the hot embarrassment and anger of a teenage boy, as his kind face turned to petulance, and suddenly, lost for anywhere to hide, he brimmed to the boil and slumped his face onto Olivia’s blanketed thigh. To muffle the sobs more than anything.

‘I can’t, I just can’t…’ he sobbed, as he shook his head into the hospital blankets, building friction between face and synthetic fibre. Electric currents raged.

‘I can’t write about you as if you’re not around. I can’t bring up two girls without you. I can’t do this. I don’t know how.’

Olivia was startled to see Daniel sob and put her hand on the back of his head as he cried into her leg. The touch of his hair felt soothing, even when she was trying to calm him. The crown of his soft hair, a thousand shades of brown, was swishy and swirly like the fur of a brown bear rippling in the wind.

‘Shhhh, it’s OK tesoro mio, it’s OK.’

Daniel raised his hopeless face. For months he had held it together, but he just couldn’t now.

‘How can I bring up two girls without you?’

Dionne stirred from behind her curtain and Daniel and Olivia heard her call button buzz from the nurses’ station in the corridor. Before a nurse could walk past and disrupt them, Olivia leaned into Daniel who was now sitting up, still clutching her thigh, and pressed her forehead to his.

‘You already know how.’

Three

September 2018

Cambridgeshire, England

‘Sofia’s asleep in your bed, Flora’s still up.’ Nancy stood in the open atrium of the Huf Haus hallway, smoothing her shirt down in the reflection of the long mirror on the wall, while the girls' Italian grandma Maria fussed in the large open living room, checking the contents of the two backpacks that were propped up on the sofa. ‘I think she’s worried about tomorrow,’ Nancy added matter-of-factly, as if she were telling her reflection. ‘Although she’s not admitting it.’

‘Flora’s worried about everything,’ Daniel said as he hung his keys on a hook by the large modern door. ‘She just doesn’t like to show it.’

To make it known that she could in fact hear hushed whisperings and chatter about her, Flora opened her bedroom door and padded along the glass balustrade of the long landing in her pyjama vest and shorts.

‘Oh, hi Dad,’ she said casually, before slipping into the bathroom.

‘Hi gorgeous,’ he gazed up. Before Daniel could ask Flora if she were OK, she shut the bathroom door behind her.

Maria, a middle-aged woman with lustrous black curls, a tiny waist and fleece-lined slippers despite the balmy September evening, shuffled towards the front door, putting on her beige mac as she checked off her mental tick-list.

‘Andiamo?’ she said to Nancy, who nodded, before both women fixed their concerned looks on Daniel, to check whether he was OK to be left. They paused, searching his face for a miracle.

‘Oh, yes, go! I’ll be fine!’ Daniel assured them.

They unfroze – for Maria to fasten her mac, and for Nancy to put her reading glasses into her handbag.

‘Their bags are all packed and on the sofa,’ Maria said, as she fixed a silk scarf around her head and tied it under her neck. Daniel would think she were a Sicilian peasant if he didn’t know her mac came from Aquascutum, and her scarf and slippers from Liberty, bought on one of their many trips to London in the past year. ‘Sofia was very particular about a certain special pencil case she wanted to use tomorrow, but I just couldn’t find it Daniel,’ she gestured with exasperated hands, pronouncing Daniel as if it had three syllables; the way Olivia had when they first met.

Dan-i-el.

‘I can get her a new one in Cambridge tomorrow if she’s that set on it.’ Maria liked any excuse to go shopping.

Daniel scratched his head.

‘The unicorn one?’

Maria nodded.

‘Si siiiiii, of course, unicorno, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked in the kitchen… her bedroom… under the sofa – nowhere!’ she said, raising her hands to a higher power – in the form of a modern chandelier made of Perspex.

‘I think it’s in my car. Don’t worry, Maria.’

‘We ought to be getting back,’ Nancy said, disinterested in the mystery of the unicorn pencil case. ‘You should have an evening.’

Some evening Daniel was going to have – it was almost ten o’clock, he noticed. Flora really should be asleep by now.

‘Si si,’ concurred Maria, slinging her designer handbag over the crook of her arm.

They looked around the spacious hallway, its glass walls either side of the door looking out to the sheltered driveway at the front, and picked up a collection of hessian shoppers, laundry bags, Tupperware, books, magazines and all the things they ferried between the Huf Haus in Guildington and their Airbnb apartment in Cambridge, which they’d become accustomed to as the trips from Milan became more frequent; as their need for washing machines and stoves and somewhere to be practical became more apparent and the spare room or the Travelodge didn’t cut the mustard.

‘We’re off!’ Nancy half whispered up the stairs. She didn’t expect a response from Flora and she knew Sofia was fast asleep.

‘Good luck tomorrow, cara mia!’ Maria added with an expectant smile, but there was no answer.

Daniel kissed both women on each cheek as they stepped out into the pale night sky and loaded up the hire car. Nancy got into the driver seat for the fifteen-minute journey back to the city centre. Maria had never learned to drive.

So much stuff. Daniel thought, as he tucked all their shoppers into the boot, feeling guilty that most of it was for his benefit. For the girls. For Olivia.

He was certainly grateful to his mothers-in-law, but Daniel couldn’t wait to be on his own. To crack open a beer. To put the telly on. To think about what Olivia had asked of him. To do some more research into promising studies. To check up on the woman from Albuquerque. To click on all the links Mimi had forwarded him over the weekend, about veganism and crazy sexy juicing and living clean and CBD oil – which he didn’t want to revisit after Flora’s dalliance with it at the start of the summer. He wanted peace and solitude so he could watch TV, get back to his iPad and scroll scroll scroll for answers and a cure.

Maria stopped in her tracks on the gravel drive and raised a finger.

‘Si. Oh Dan-i-el.’ Three syllables. Daniel leaned against the door frame, his hands in his pockets. ‘Mimi called the house phone. Said she’d try you on your mobile.’ Daniel remembered the three texts from Mimi he had received at Olivia’s bedside.

‘Grazie Maria,’ he said with a nod. He loved the women dearly, but couldn’t wait to close the front door on them.

*

Daniel kicked off his trainers, leaving them on the floor by the shoe rack and walked up the floating staircase in his socks. He wanted to put on Match of the Day 2, but he felt the pull to check on his girls first. As he walked up the stairs his feet felt sweaty, leaving a misty imprint on each step as he rose, and he cursed himself for overdressing today in jeans and a top when shorts and a T-shirt would have done.

He opened his bedroom door to see Sofia lying face down, cheek pressed on the mattress just below the pillow, a picture of purity. Her mouth was open in a small circle and she was wearing little pants and no vest – standard night attire for their hot bod, who always worked up a sweat while sleeping. Daniel unravelled Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban from under Sofia’s arm, placed it on the bedside table, turned off the lamp and kissed her cheek with dry lips and a broken heart.

Sofia stirred and Daniel froze by the door, not wanting to wake her. She’d slept so fretfully for the past few weeks and months, he’d stopped protesting about her padding into her parents’ room and edging him across the big double bed.

It doesn’t matter.

Daniel – eyes already wrung from having sobbed into Olivia’s thigh in the hospital – wanted to cry again, but he put his hand to his dry mouth as he looked at his little girl: his bear cub with brown hair like his. He walked back to the bed and half covered her, for comfort more than warmth, and closed the door gently behind him. Past the spare bedroom, Sofia’s bedroom and the family bathroom, at the other end of the landing, Daniel tapped Flora’s bedroom door twice gently and opened it.

‘Hey…’

‘Hi.’

‘You ought to get some sleep you know.’

Flora groaned.

‘You’ll want to feel your very best for the first day back.’

Daniel tried to not sound pressurising, then had a sudden flash of panic about uniforms, bags and packed-lunch boxes, before reminding himself that Maria would definitely have taken care of it all.

‘Their bags are all packed and on the sofa.’

Flora lay on her side, one arm under her head, gazing into the lava lamp on her bedside table. Daniel perched on her bed by her knees. Up close he could see Flora’s irises illuminated by the light, like the swishes and swirls in brown and orange marbles he played with as a child, as she watched red orbs of wax rise gently.

‘Whatcha looking at?’

He rued himself for trying to sound cool.

Daniel followed Flora’s gaze and examined the mutating globules of wax as they rose like balloons at a fiesta before reconsidering; they started to look like haemoglobin sharpening into focus under a microscope. The water in the lamp like the bags of fluid, drugs and saline that weaved in and out of Flora’s mother. Daniel didn’t find the lamp as soothing to look at as Flora seemed to.

‘I don’t want to go back.’

‘But it’s Year 10!’ Daniel said, as if galvanising her into battle. ‘GCSEs start here! My big girl needs to glide into that school like the goddess she is, refreshed from the summer. Ready to take on the—’

‘Not school.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to go back to that place. To Mum.’

Flora gave a guilty sideways glance in the direction of her dad then looked back quickly at the rising red blood cells.

Daniel ruffled the back of his hair, trying to hold back a groan. He desperately wanted to stroke Flora’s hair, lighter as it usually was at the end of the summer, not the deep russet it turned in midwinter. Flora hadn’t spent this summer in Camogli or Ibiza or Scotland. This summer had been spent at the local lido, her hair turning lighter as her freckled face turned pink with blushes caused by the boys doing their A levels, many of whom fancied Flora but didn’t know what to say to her because of her mum.

Daniel hadn’t stroked her hair in so long, he didn’t want her to feel awkward. She had been increasingly standoffish since her mother’s illness; even worse since her incident with four friends and a bottle of CBD oil.

‘Aww, don’t say that princess. Mamma loves seeing you. She loves you so much. Your visits are the best thing about her day.’

As he said it, Daniel realised he was piling too much pressure on his daughter, adding to the million reasons he already felt wretched. Wretched about being a bad dad. About palming the girls off on Nancy and Maria. About the fact there seemed to be nothing he could do to make Olivia better.

She is still a child.

‘I know Papa. But I want her here. Where she should be.’

‘I know, and she will…’

Flora rolled onto her back and flashed her father a look of mistrust and doubt.

‘And that’s great you’re keen to go back to school. After the