Before

After the funeral – after Rebekah had avoided Gareth at the wake so obviously that, eventually, he’d had no choice but to leave – she and Johnny decided to take their father’s rust-eaten Plymouth Gran Fury for a drive across the Verrazzano Bridge. The plan had been to take it out to Staten Island and then loop back, a journey for old times’ sake, a way to be close to their dad, to something he’d loved, because he’d always loved the Plymouth. But when they got to Staten Island, they decided to keep going.

They headed down the Parkway to an old motel near Union Beach called the J. It was special to them, a place their father had taken them every summer when they were kids, even though he could barely afford it. Except when Rebekah and Johnny finally got there, the motel was closed – and not just for the day.

In that moment, as they looked at the derelict building, then at each other, tears filled their eyes. They knew why: there was a strange resonance to the place, a symmetry to this ending, as if the life of the motel had ceased alongside their father’s.

Back in the car, Rebekah said, ‘Dad kept repeating something weird at the end.’ Johnny glanced at her. ‘“Even the dead can talk.”’

This time, her brother looked at her like she was losing it.

‘That’s what he kept telling me. He said he learned it as a cop.’

‘Okay,’ Johnny replied, although it was clear that he remained unconvinced. ‘I might use it in my next book.’

‘I’m serious, Johnny.’

He nodded, as if realizing his comment hadn’t landed. ‘Dad was on his way out, Bek, you know that.’

‘So?’

‘So you know how he was. He was mumbling a lot.’

‘You really think I misheard? Why would I mishear that?’

Johnny didn’t say anything, just smiled reassuringly, but she could see the answer in his face. Because we just lost our dad. Because we’re grieving, and we’re hurt, and we’re tired.

In that moment, on that day, what Johnny had said to her seemed to make sense. But, in the weeks afterwards, she started to think more about what her father had repeated, about what he’d believed, the rules he’d adhered to, and then memories of Rebekah’s mother returned, as they always did eventually. In truth, Rebekah had never stopped thinking about her.

She was always there, their stranger and betrayer, a woman who’d not shown any interest in her kids, never put up any sort of fight for them, even after their father – when Johnny was thirteen, Rebekah eleven, and Mike nine – had made the decision to move them to New York. She’d never sought out Rebekah in the years after that either, even when Rebekah had made the tough decision not to go to the States with the others, but to stay behind in London and take up a fully paid athletics scholarship at a prestigious private school. In the weeks before he left her, Rebekah’s father had sat at the kitchen table and cried his eyes out every night, even though he knew what an opportunity it was for her. He’d even promised to fly Rebekah out to the US at the end of every school term, even if he had no idea how he’d ever pay for it.

But Rebekah’s mother just remained silent.

Until the year Henry Murphy had returned to New York with Johnny and Mike, and Rebekah had headed to halls of residence in north London, the four of them had lived in the same house Fiona had walked out of, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know where to find them. They had the same phone number. Henry worked at the same police station. If she’d come back at any point in those eight years, she would have found them easily.

‘Has Mum called today, Dad?’

For a long time, Rebekah would ask Henry the same question. He’d always insist that the four of them eat together, so she’d most frequently ask it at the dinner table, and whenever she did, her brothers would stop, the same as her, forks paused above their plates, and await their father’s answer.

But their father’s answer would always be the same. ‘No, honey. She hasn’t.’

‘Why?’

Henry would reach to Rebekah then, to whichever of his sons was on the other side of him, and put his hands on their arms, reassuring them, settling them down. ‘I think if your mother was going to call, she would have done it by now. But it’s not your fault. None of this is any of your fault. You’re the best kids any parent could have asked for.’

‘Is she dead?’

Mike.

It was always Mike who asked that, spoiling the tenderness of their father’s words. He was the youngest, so he had a ready-made excuse for his tactlessness, but he remembered Fiona less too. He had been a baby when she left, his mother just a flicker in the dark.

‘I don’t know, Mikey,’ their father would say.

‘If she was alive,’ Rebekah asked, ‘she’d want to see us, wouldn’t she?’

But their father would never respond to that.

After six years apart from her family, only seeing them in the holidays when Henry could afford to fly her out, Rebekah decided she’d been away from her dad and her brothers too long and applied to American universities. At eighteen, she completed her A levels and bought a one-way ticket for New York.

In that time, her mother still hadn’t come up for air.

By then, Rebekah’s resolve had hardened, and she’d convinced herself she didn’t give a shit. When she arrived at JFK, the three of them were waiting for her, and she knew straight away that – as alien as America was to her – she’d made the right choice to leave the UK. Home wasn’t a place.

It was wherever her family were.

And so, on that first day, as her father drove them back to their house in Brooklyn, as Mike made jokes about his sister’s plummy accent and Johnny talked passionately about the novel he wanted to write, she told herself she was completely at peace.

But, like all lies, eventually it fell apart.