I got on a plane to my mother’s hospital and my husband was eleven rows in front of me with my best friend. There was a note of hers in my handbag that she’d written on my fridge that morning.

PART 1 — ROW FOURTEEN

Corin has been away three or four times a month for about nine years.

Eighteen years married, three kids, and you get used to a man with a wheelie case in the hall on a Tuesday morning. The children stopped asking where he was going in about 2019.

He went on the Tuesday. Ardmere City, two nights, a thing with a supplier.

And at about half eleven my mother’s neighbour rang me.

Mum is seventy-four and she lives at Caldwell, which is forty minutes from Ardmere City, and she had gone into hospital that morning.

I did not do any thinking at all for about two hours. I rang my sister, I rang the school, I put Bee’s stuff in a bag for next door, and I got the first seat I could get on a phone in a car park.

Saskia was at my house when the call came.