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Afterwards they agreed it had not gone badly, which was the most either of them was prepared to say out loud.

Margaret had driven. Tom had held the flowers on his knee the whole way, the cellophane crackling at every corner. Neither of them mentioned that their father had never liked lilies. At the house, the new owners had been kind. They showed them the garden, where the apple tree was gone, and the back bedroom, which was now painted a colour Tom privately thought of as surrender. Nobody cried. Margaret counted that as a victory, though she couldn't have said against whom.

Now they were in her kitchen, coats still on, the flowers lying across the table like something waiting to be identified.

"He'd have hated the paint," Tom said.

"He'd have hated the people."

"They were nice."

"That's what he'd have hated."

Tom laughed, then stopped, as though he'd been caught at something. Margaret filled the kettle because it was what you did, switched it on, and sat back down.

The kettle boiled. Neither moved to do anything about it, and it clicked off on its own, and the silence afterwards was somehow louder than the noise had been.

"I kept thinking he'd come out of the shed," Tom said eventually.

Margaret nodded. She had been thinking the same thing for eleven months: in supermarkets, at traffic lights, in the middle of the night.

"Tea?" she said.

"Go on, then."

She stood and put her hand flat against the side of the kettle. Still warm. She switched it on again anyway.