Grace buckled her seatbelt and gazed out of the aeroplane window, barely able to quell the swirl of delight that was building within her. Not long now and she would be back in beautiful Italy with her boyfriend, Ellis, for a wonderful weekend together. Pushing her sunglasses up – she had treated herself to a pair of tortoiseshell Versace ones, just like Nonna Maria’s – not real, expensive ones, but near enough. Grace’s shades were fake and therefore a fraction of the price, from a stall in Greenwich Market. One of the places she liked to wander around on a Saturday afternoon on her way back from an art gallery in London or a dance class at the famous Pineapple Studio. Yes, she loved going out on her own now. She loved the freedom of it. The feeling of doing exactly as she pleased and whenever she liked. Because it had turned out that Cora wasn’t as immobile as she had led Grace and her three siblings to believe.

While Grace had been away, her brother Mikey, outraged and egged on by a still fuming Bernie, because Grace had had the temerity to leave Cora and go to Italy, had installed a secret camera in her bedroom. Mikey had never liked Jamie, his macho ego uncomfortable around ‘gayness’, as Mikey ignorantly called it, and so the camera was installed with the intention of spying on Jamie. Or, to put in Mikey’s words, ‘to make sure the staff aren’t slapping the old dears around like you see on those undercover documentary programmes on the telly’ as he had said that time before in the phone conversation when Grace had called him asking him for help caring for their mother.

But an altogether different scene had met their eyes on watching the film back. Jamie had told Grace all about it when she had first arrived home the day after Ellis had made love to her all night long.