Seeing him cooing over the stupid baby the next day in the kitchen gave her an idea. She went through to where Flora was squinting at her phone. Everyone looked all day at their phones, then if she wanted to do it they said, “No, no phones for you, Agot,” even though if it was bad, why did they do it all day, and then they would say, “Agot, you are being too noisy,” and she would absolutely not be noisy if she had a phone. Why was everyone so stupid ? And why was Christmas so far away ? When you are five, four weeks is forever.

“Auntie Flora,” she said conversationally.

“Darling,” said Flora, who had been looking at flour sourcing and wondering why the hell Fintan wasn’t.

“I think,” said Agot seriously, “I think Uncle Joel does not love us anymore.”

“Do you?” said Flora.

She glanced above Agot’s head and saw Joel dancing with the baby in the kitchen, little Douglas giggling and reaching up his little fingers. It was a pretty sight.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because it is true.” Agot sighed in a world-weary fashion. “He loves that baby now.”

“I think it’s possible to love more than one person at once,” said Flora.

Agot frowned. “One time,” she said, “I dropped Big Fox and Daisy Duck and Jamford into a puddle at the same time, because it was a wet, wet, wet day.”

Jamford was a small stuffed cow she dragged along, the origin of whose name was lost in the mists of time.

“And,” she said darkly, “I picked up Jamford first.”

Flora thought about that. “Well, yes, I can see that,” she said. “But you picked up Big Fox and Daisy Duck next, right?”

Agot shook her head solemnly. “No,” she said. “Jamford was very muddy, so I had to fix him.”

“And you left Big Fox and Daisy Duck in the mud?”

She shrugged. “Oh, maybe Daddy got them.”

Flora looked at her. “I don’t think Uncle Joel would leave you in the mud,” she said.

“Not me, silly,” said Agot. “You!”

Then she clambered up in Flora’s lap.

“Hmm hmm hmm, oh, look, a phone,” she said, repeating herself and getting gradually louder until Flora handed it over. Agot sat back with a contented sigh, while Flora glanced over at Joel, who had to be in London that night and was patently unhappy about it.

BACK AT THE Seaside Kitchen, Iona had filled her Instagram feed with beautiful shots of the previous night to go with all the lovely pics she already had of the café. She wasn’t getting much traction, and everyone else was getting annoyed with her, as she insisted on lining up every single thing perfectly, buying so many fairy lights their electricity bill was going up, and using a ruler to straighten the edges of her Battenberg cake to make sure it looked absolutely perfect in the photographs.

She had lobbied Flora to buy new artsy-looking cake stands, which Flora was dead set against—it was hard enough to keep the lights on through the winter as it was. And now old Mrs. McClocherty was waiting to get served at the till, and Mrs. Barr behind her, who was having to deal with the wait for cake by listening to an exhaustive list of Mrs. McClocherty’s latest medical symptoms.