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long slow months of my hospital stay. Whether it was the right decision or not, who could say? My poor father had been desperate enough to do whatever he could to minimise my pain. Half demented with grief, I had clung to him desperately from my hospital bed and pleaded with him to let us move far away: so move we did.
    Suddenly the memories coming at me were cyanide-bitter and I turned from the house and began walking briskly away. My eyes started to water furiously as a bitter icy wind blasted my face; at least I thought it was the wind doing that.
    I walked face down against the gusting currents, my stride just short of a run. At the end of the street I stopped and hesitated. I was standing at a crossroads; in a physical as well as a spiritual sense. If it hadn’t been so heartbreakingly sad it would almost have been funny. The headache, which the painkillers had dulled to a persistent throb, now threatened to go into overdrive. I could use it as an excuse not to make my next stop. But I thought I’d been hiding behind excuses for too long now.
    My hand gripped tightly on the door knocker, as a fleeting glimmer of hope ran through me. Perhaps they too had moved? Sarah had never said but then we hadn’t spoken of his family at all in the intervening years. Some wounds just go too deep.
    If she was shocked by my appearance on her doorstep after a five-year absence, she hid it well. She also hid her reaction to my damaged face, which I knew she must have noticed with the wind whipping my hair about my head in long chestnut banners. I hoped I was as good at masking my own shock when I saw how much she had aged in the intervening years. Although she smiled and reached out to envelope me in a welcoming hug, the grief was so deeply etched into her face that I realised no new emotion was ever going to be powerful enough to erase it. Guilt sliced through me like a knife wound. It was my fault she looked like that. My fault she had lost her son.
    It hadn’t been an easy afternoon, and by the time I got back to the hotel, the tension and the emotions of the day had brought my headache to a never-before-experienced crescendo of agony. My first action on returning to my room was to blindly fumble in my toiletry bag for the bottle of pills. I ignored the dosage instructions on the label and immediately dry-swallowed two tablets instead of one. As I waited for the medication to kick in, I ran a deep hot bath in the small white-tiled bathroom.
    The headache was still with me as I slid under the fragrantly perfumed water; slightly better when I emerged pink and beginning to shrivel almost half an hour later, and back to a manageable dull ache when I realised it was already time to get ready for the evening ahead.
    I tried to keep my mind away from my visit with Jimmy’s mother, knowing there was much I needed to consider about what she had said that day, and knowing too that this night was not the time to do so. I couldn’t afford myself the luxury of thinking of that now. First, we all had to face the night ahead; a night of reunion and a time of celebration, all the while trying to ignore the fact that, for the first time, we would be meeting as six instead of seven.
    ‘Baby steps,’ I murmured again to myself as I settled before the dressing table and began to apply my make-up.
    Sarah had chosen the location for the dinner well. We were booked at a fancy restaurant on the other side of town. A place far too expensive and sophisticated to have been visited by us in our student days. I got there deliberately early, a good thirty minutes before our allocated time, hoping it would give me some sort of mental advantage. Having given Sarah’s name to the maître d’, I declined the suggestion to wait at the bar and asked instead to be seated straight away.
    I was ushered to a large circular table in the far corner of the restaurant. I chose a chair facing the doorway, wanting the advantage of being able to see who would arrive next.