Alex sat by the bedside, holding her mother’s hand loosely, letting it rest in hers. Holding hands seemed strange; alien. It wasn’t something they’d ever done much, not even when Alex had been a small child. It wasn’t that her mother had been a bad mother. She just hadn’t been like a lot of others.

Chloe’s words were preying on her mind. All the more reason to put things right now. For years, Alex’s relationship with her mother had been fraught with complications and blighted by disappointments her mother had never quite been able to conceal. They had always been there – little comments about what Alex had chosen to wear to an end-of-year school party, facial reactions to her exam results. Then tensions that had created a divide when Alex was a teenager went on to become the things that would in later years carve an impassable crevasse between them.

She knew she should say something. She just didn’t know what.

Do you remember that time you told me I’d never amount to much? she thought.

‘Hi, Mum,’ she said, still sceptical that Gillian would even hear the words. ‘It’s me. I’ve opened the window a bit – it was so warm in here. I know you don’t like to be too warm. The weather’s been lovely. Sandal weather, you used to call it … do you remember?’

God, she thought, I’m talking about the weather. She sat back in the chair, her mother’s hand still resting in hers. Where had things gone so wrong that in these final moments all she could find to talk about was the weather?

There was a sound at the door and one of the carers popped her head into the room, offering Alex a sympathetic smile. ‘Shall I get you a cup of tea?’

Alex nodded. ‘Thanks.’

The girl left again, leaving them alone to the unsettling silence. It was punctuated every now and then by a rattle from her mother’s chest, weak and distant, but there all the same.

‘I’m sorry I disappointed you, Mum,’ Alex said. ‘I’m sorry I could never be the straight-A student you wanted … It was never really going to happen, though, was it?’

She could remember still – as clearly as though it had been the previous afternoon – the argument she had overheard between her mum and dad: her father telling his wife that Alex had tried her best and there was nothing more they could ask from her; her mother declaring that it wasn’t good enough.

And Alex had continued to disappoint. She’d moved between bar jobs and shops for a while, unsure what she wanted to do with her life. That uncertainty had continued for years, right up until her father had died suddenly of a heart attack when she was twenty-seven. His death had been unexpected, ripping the ground from beneath her feet, changing everything. A week after his funeral, she heard a radio advertisement for police recruitment. The following week, she handed in her notice at the restaurant where she’d been working. But by then it was too late to change her mother’s fixed opinion of her.

The sound of Gillian’s breathing had faded into an almost inaudible hum. She looked peaceful, and for that Alex was grateful. There had been anger, confusion, bitterness, denial. All of it leading to this.

She would never forget that hospital; that diagnosis. The memory of the smell of the place – the disinfectant tinge that coated the air – and the stark whiteness that pervaded every room brought everything flooding back: that office in which she had sat barely hearing the doctor’s words; the room in which her mother lay for a total of twelve days, with the window that wouldn’t shut properly, allowing the whistling wind to filter in with a continual angry hiss; the stretch of corridor that linked the unit to the restaurant, and those endless walks for pointless cups of tea that went untouched.

Thoughts of the past were interrupted by the carer’s arrival with Alex’s tea, which she placed on the bedside table. Yet another cup that would be left to go cold.

‘You OK?’ she asked.

Alex nodded. She felt sorry for the girl. She probably felt obliged to say something, but there was nothing to say. How many times had she had to do this?

‘Let us know if you need anything.’

‘Thanks.’

The carer left the room, leaving Alex and her mother in silence. It was pitch dark outside now; she closed the window and drew the curtains, shutting out the night. She returned to the seat and took her mother’s hand in hers again, tracing her pale, bony knuckles with her fingertips.

She wondered if this was normal. She couldn’t cry. She wasn’t sure what she felt, or if in that moment she even felt anything at all. Did it make her cold; inhuman somehow? Was there a set of rules for times such as this?

If their relationship been different, she might not have felt like this now. It was difficult to forget the things her mother had said to her, particularly as her illness had worsened. She knew that often it had been the dementia talking and not Gillian, yet the accusations and recriminations that had left her mouth had been based somewhere in truth, heightened versions of what had already gone before. Alex’s failed relationships. Her childlessness. Her divorce. She respected the fact that her mother was entitled to an opinion, but that didn’t mean she had to appreciate hearing it at every opportunity Gillian had deemed suitable to offer it up.

Though it was the dementia that had disinhibited her mother’s brain, there was no doubt in Alex’s mind that the hurtful things it was throwing out had been there all along, years before she had been afflicted by the awful disease that had cost her everything. Many of them had been said and heard before.

But despite everything, she had stood by her mother throughout her illness. She had moved her into the house shortly before her ex-husband had left, although by then their marriage had already been in its final stages. Her mother’s condition had deteriorated more rapidly than either she or the doctors had foreseen; eventually Gillian had become unable to walk, and at that point Alex had been advised that the house was no longer a safe place for her. The guilt was something that was never going to go away, regardless of the misery her mother had sometimes caused her.

‘I’m sorry it hasn’t been what you wanted,’ Alex told her now. ‘If I could have made things different, I would have. It wasn’t all bad, was it?’

She remembered the beach holidays they’d had when she was a child: the long afternoons spent searching rock pools for crabs and eating sandwiches that had turned to mush in the heat of the afternoon. But her father had been there then. It seemed to Alex now that this was where everything had changed. They had worked as three, in their own unique way, but they had never worked as two. Losing her father had been the moment when Alex’s relationship with her mother had finally come to its end.

‘Say hi to Dad for me,’ she said.

She let her mother’s hand slip from hers and rest on the duvet. Her face was relaxed, her chest still. And Alex realised she was already gone.