‘Nice,’ said Izzie. ‘But I’m so not going to kiss him. That is just not happening, all right?’

And then she heard it. A giggle from outside her bedroom door. The room seemed to lurch around her as she glanced back in horror to see that the door was open a crack and there was a small Seren-sized person lurking, in order to eavesdrop on the conversation. Izzie’s stomach plummeted. Shit. How much had she heard?

‘Got to go,’ she said quickly, ending the call, before leaping off the bed and striding over to the door. ‘Hey! Don’t spy on me,’ she snapped.

Seren didn’t seem bothered to have been discovered. She looked excited in fact, hopping from foot to foot, her long hair swinging around her pale face. ‘You were talking about kissing,’ she said gleefully. She was holding a Sylvanian Families cat in each hand and pushed them together in a grinding clinch. ‘Have you got a boyfriend? Have you done sex with him?’

Izzie felt like throttling her. ‘None of your business, you little shit,’ she growled before she could stop herself, at which point Seren’s eyes became big and round and her expression went from gleeful to positively thrilled.

‘That’s a very bad word,’ she said severely. ‘You said a bad word to me.’ And then she turned and was hurrying off downstairs as if she couldn’t wait to broadcast the news. ‘Izzie said a bad word to me,’ she announced at the top of her voice. ‘And she was talking about kissing. I heard her!’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ Izzie blustered, thudding after her. ‘Stop being an annoying brat.’

‘And she called me an annoying brat,’ Seren added immediately. ‘Daddy?’ She had reached the ground floor by now and went racing into the kitchen. ‘Daddy! Izzie said I was an annoying brat and said a bad word and was talking about kissing. And she said—’

‘And you were eavesdropping on a private phone conversation between me and my friend,’ Izzie yelled hotly. The last thing she needed was for Seren to work out exactly who they had been talking about and dob her in for that, too. Had the little girl actually heard Izzie say the words ‘He’s my mum’s boyfriend’? If so, it was surely only a matter of time before she put two and two together and rumbled Izzie to the adults. And how utterly excruciating would that be?

Storming into the kitchen, Izzie saw that George was washing up while Em was tracing a route on a map at the kitchen table. Jack, meanwhile, was finishing a mid-morning bowl of cornflakes with enough milk to have turned it into soup. They all looked round at the noisy entrance of the two girls.

‘Whoa,’ cried George, hands in the sink. ‘Seren, calm down and stop shouting.’

‘Izzie, what’s going on?’ Em asked, her finger still on the map.