We got back in the car. Emma had her steak bake half gone before her seatbelt was on, and she dunked a corner of it in my coffee without asking, which is a thing she does, which I have stopped fighting, because the day she stops dunking things in my coffee is the day something has gone wrong between us.
We pulled off the motorway again twenty minutes later, and this time it was not for fuel.
I took us round the back of the services, past the lorry park, to the dead corner where the cameras do not reach and nobody walks. Black glass. Nobody could see in. I killed the engine and the rain that had been threatening since Birmingham came down soft on the roof.
She was already looking at me.
"We are going to be late for your mother," she said, and undid her own seatbelt.
"She raised me. She knows what I'm like."
