Bridget remembers the call. How could she forget it? Toni hadn’t rung from Dorset to say she’d got there safely like she always did – one of their silly habits from the old days, one that had stuck. So Bridget was calling her, getting no reply, and then finally Toni called back. But it wasn’t Toni, it was a doctor calling from Toni’s phone: she was at West Middlesex A&E, was this Antonia Flint’s next of kin?

‘I’m her sister,’ Bridget said. ‘I’m Bridget, Bridget Casement.’

It was only later that she realised she should have said, ‘No, that’s Stan. Stan Flint’s her next of kin.’

Later still that she was hit with the knowledge that what the doctor had said was, after all, the truth.

‘OK, Bridget, I need you to listen. Your sister’s been involved in a serious accident. I need you to come in as fast as you can.’

‘Is she… is she alive?’

‘She is. But she’s been seriously injured. If you could come as soon as you can.’

Too much to think about, even now. They’d only made it as far as the M3, less than twenty miles away. Rosie had not one bruise, not one scratch, had stayed safe in the back seat of Toni and Stan’s rusty old VW Golf.

Memories come in flashes. Sometimes Bridget can’t place them accurately in time. Toni saving up painkillers in a jar is one. Toni asking Bridget to smother her with a pillow.

‘Please, Bridge.’

‘I can’t. You can’t ask me to do that.’

Those dark nights in the house on the river, before they moved to the flat. Bridget would go to her in the dark. She would stroke her hair.

‘Go to sleep, Tones.’

‘I want to die.’

‘I get that. But Rosie needs you, and the sun will come up, and by then it’ll be tomorrow.’

‘You won’t leave, will you?’

‘Of course I won’t leave. Go to sleep.’

Little Rosie slept at the foot of Toni’s bed on her camping lilo. Bridget wonders how she never woke up, especially when the nightmares came. God knows, Bridget could hear Toni shouting from the next room. But Rosie refused to sleep anywhere else.

‘I want to sleep with Mummy.’

Bridget wasn’t about to argue with that. The poor kid had lost her dad. This was in the days and weeks after Toni came back from hospital, when they were gathering up the pieces, seeing what they had.

Bridget took Rosie’s room until they moved into the flat. Bridget took her to school, picked her up, took her to Café Bellissimo for hot chocolate, to Helen’s sometimes. In the early months, Rosie would come in and lie on Toni’s bed, do her homework at her dressing table while Bridget made the dinner.

‘I don’t want Daddy put in the ground.’

How long afterwards did Rosie say this? Actually, it was further back. Tones was still in hospital.

‘It’s too cold in the ground,’ Rosie said. ‘Daddy hates the cold.’

Her little face at Toni’s bedside. A small girl playing guardian angel to her own mother. Sitting on a hospital chair, her scuffed shoes dangling on the ends of her little legs. She still had her uniform on and she smelled like kids smell after a day at school: of dust and dirt and the detergent they use to polish the floors.

‘All right,’ Toni said, glancing at Bridget, her smile so full of doubt, Bridget had to look away.

‘It’s dirty as well.’ Rosie spoke with the gravity of a lawyer, counted the points on her fingers. ‘And it’s got worms.’

But my God, the denial was worse.

‘Auntie Bridge? When’s Daddy coming home?’

Bridget stopping, squatting down on the pavement on the way home from school, meeting Rosie’s blue eyes. ‘Remember, Squirt. Daddy’s gone up to heaven, hasn’t he?’ And her, Bridget, an atheist, but you do what you can.

‘But you said he’s in the hospital.’

‘He is, poppet. But he’s in the morgue, isn’t he, yeah? And that’s just his body, isn’t it? His soul is in heaven, which means he can see you but he can’t come back in his body, and if you need to talk to him you have to pray.’

She nods, so solemn there on the pavement as life ploughs forward around them, people so oblivious that some days Bridget wants to shout: What are you all doing? How can you carry on when this has happened? Have you no shame?

Rosie’s face, the penny seeming to drop. But then: ‘So when will Daddy come home?’

Bridget standing up, holding out her hand. ‘Shall we go to the café? How about a hot chocolate?’

Rosie’s tiny hand, a hand you could crush just by holding it too tight. Yes, Daddy’s coming home next week, Bridget wanted to tell her. But she couldn’t, could she? And then one day in the hospital, like that, Rosie said about the ground being cold. It was maybe a week, maybe two, after.

‘Remember I said about making special ashes,’ Bridget said gently. ‘So that we can keep him at home with us?’

Rosie nodded. ‘Are we going to do that then?’

‘I think so.’ Bridget looked to her sister for help, but Toni couldn’t even nod. She still had the chin support, was still being fed mush on account of losing most of her top teeth, breaking her soft palate. All she could do was whisper yes and blink, which sent two fresh tears coursing down her cheeks. Bridget thought of Stan’s clothes, still hanging in the wardrobe, of his book still on his bedside table, his glasses folded on top – he had forgotten to take them on holiday. She wondered if she should move these things, clear them out, if she should ask whether or not Toni wanted her to. What would be worse to come back to – evidence or absence?

‘We can buy a special jar,’ Bridget ploughed on. ‘We’ll maybe buy a nice vase from one of those posh shops in Richmond. I could take you there tomorrow, Squirt, how does that sound? Or we could even get my mate Cath to make something.’

And that’s what they did. Cath, Bridget’s potter friend in Teddington, made an urn, and that’s where Stan is now, on the top right-hand side of the bookshelf that the fireplace divides into two.

And all their lives divide that way, into two: before and after.