My card was declined while I was buying nappies for my baby. My husband told me to figure it out myself. His mother called me a useless leech. So I rang my late father’s banker and said one sentence.

And his mother knew.

She has been selling things. Quietly, since about the September, through a dealer two towns over — Her mother’s rings. A pair of paintings off the landing. The dining set, which went in the October and about which she told the family she had wanted something more modern.

I ate at that dining set about forty times.