“You were lucky, you had this wonderful father. She didn’t have that. You don’t know how that feels because you’re lucky, really you were born lucky—but I know. And she was a part of our family, practically!” She was pleading with me. The tears that had been gathering now fell. “No, Mum . . . no, she wasn’t. You’re misremembering: you never liked her. Who knows what went on in that family or what she needed protecting from, if anything? No one ever told us—she certainly never did. Every family on that corridor had secrets.” I looked at her and thought: do you want to know ours?
