My neighbour on one side was Doris Wright.

She was eighty-two, sharp as a tack, and had rented her house from Larkspur since the very first year. She grew roses in her front garden that were better than anyone's on the whole development. She told me Nigel had complained about them once for being “too showy.”

On my other side was Liam Carter. Single dad. Thirty-five. A bus mechanic, with two boys, Josh and Sam, who were eight and ten.

The boys played football on the green every evening after school. Loudly. Happily. The way boys do.

Nigel hated it.

“The green is for quiet enjoyment,” he'd say, standing at the edge with his arms folded. “Not for… this.”

Liam always apologised. He always called the boys in. He always looked tired and worried afterwards.

“We can't afford to make trouble,” he told me one evening, over the fence. “If Larkspur doesn't renew our tenancy, we've got nowhere to go. The boys' school is just down the road. Their mum's not around. This is all they've got.”

I looked at Josh and Sam, sitting on the back step in their muddy kit, eating fish fingers.

I thought about my mum, crying at the kitchen table.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. Not yet.

But I remembered everything.