‘Let’s just have a quiet one today,’ Mum replied in this sad, dreary sort of voice, as if she had completely given up on the notion of holiday fun. Which in itself was so disturbingly un-Mum-ish that the words made Izzie want to throw herself on the floor and clutch at Em’s dressing gown, pleading forgiveness for the hundredth time.

‘Mum, I really am so sorry,’ she mumbled, knotted up with guilt and shame, while Jack went over to the fridge and began gulping orange juice straight from the carton. There – another sign that Mum was still flattened by yesterday’s events, because she didn’t even start bollocking him about hygiene and Just get a glass and pour it out, it’s not difficult, as she usually would have done. No, her gaze just slid right over him with supreme indifference. Bloody hell. This was bad.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Em replied dully – which was clearly a massive lie. Of course it mattered, Izzie thought, plunging slices of bread down in the toaster and silently fetching three plates. Mum had been nuts about George, and now Izzie had inadvertently destroyed the relationship and sent him packing. She had to find a way to haul her mother back up again, and fast.

After breakfast, an uneasy silence settled upon the house. Mum trudged upstairs saying she thought she was getting a migraine and was going back to bed, and Jack was plugged glassy-eyed into some game or other and would almost certainly not move a muscle until lunchtime. Izzie didn’t know what else to do other than slope back into bed herself. One family: broken, she thought. One holiday: ruined.

Over Christmas last year she’d worked in a gift shop in town, selling ornaments and vases and little wooden signs with cheesy slogans like The Sun Might Not Be Shining But We’ve Always Got Gin! to middle-class people who had nothing better to spend their money on. There had been notices up everywhere: You break it, you pay for it and clumsy Izzie had spent every shift dreading the moment when she was sure to elbow a cocktail glass off a shelf or trip over one of the tweedy Scottie-dog doorstops and go flying straight into the bone-china dinner-service display. The phrase kept coming back to her now as if it was a command: You broke this, Izzie Hughes, you’d better damn well pay for it. But how?