He told me about the day I moved into my first apartment, how my father had dismissed my work as temporary and my mother had asked why I couldn’t live somewhere more respectable.

Richard had offered to help carry boxes.

I had refused his money but accepted a secondhand kitchen table from his attic.

‘You kept looking over your shoulder while we moved it in,’ he said.

‘I wondered how long it would take you to feel that the apartment was yours.’

I remembered that table.

I still owned it, its surface scarred by hot mugs and the beginning of Noah’s baby photographs.

‘I think I only started feeling that way after he was born,’ I admitted.