Fifteen minutes before the taxi, my six-year-old put her arms round my waist and whispered that when I travel, her stepmother puts something in her juice and then films her. I looked at the kitchen. Cora was standing in the doorway smiling, still holding the glass.

“Has she said anything else?”

Mina looked down the hall again.

“That one day you’ll understand I need to live somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. She says if I tell you about the juice you’ll believe the videos and think I’m making it up.”

And then, because she is six and because six-year-olds do not order information by importance, she said:

“She talks to Julian too.”

I had never heard that name in my life.

“Who’s Julian?”

“A man who comes when you’re away. They talk about Mummy’s beach house.”

Cora was in the kitchen doorway.

She had been there for some part of that, and I do not know how much, and I have never found out.

She was smiling at us, and she had a glass in her hand.

I said, “She doesn’t want me to go,” in a completely normal voice, and I stood up, and I picked up my case.

I kissed my daughter. I kissed my wife.

I got in the taxi at four minutes past seven and I went to the end of Wrenfold Lane and I told the driver to pull over.

Then I cancelled the flight, rang my sister-in-law, and sat in a car park eleven minutes away until eight o’clock.