‘I’m sorry about them letters,’ Carly muttered, not sounding it.

‘Forget about it.’

‘It wasn’t Jackson’s fault.’

‘I said forget it. Honestly.’

‘Were they important?’

Unable to answer, Pax knew Carly’s chippiness was because she couldn’t possibly understand how devastating the discovery of Lester’s box of letters was. It rewrote her childhood. Keep thinking about something else.

‘Don’t our boys get on well?’

‘Ellis gets on with everyone.’

Pax doubted that. ‘I’m so grateful you brought him.’

Watching Kes charging about with Ellis, happier than she’d seen him in weeks, Pax could forgive Carly her sullenness. The two boys were lost to a five-year-old world that lifted them above the rest of the party, an instant, loyal bond where worlds, real and imaginary, coincided joyfully, far from the paranoia of adulthood with its hormones, heartbreak and hubris. And its hooch.

God, but she longed for a drink.

Her father was the first one who had taken her wassailing, she remembered. He’d probably only done because he wanted to get pissed too. Had Lester been there?

Keep thinking about something else.

She focussed on Carly, forcing a smile. She was a beautiful woman, her high cheeks and grey-denim eyes like her son’s, both with angular, boyish bodies, fierce walk once again marching forwards, broody looks cast sideway at Pax who admired her uncompromising indifference, a marked contrast to her loud-mouthed friend. Bridge was adorably entertaining, but Carly had steel spun through her.

Ahead of them, the phone in Luca’s pocket started ringing. He silenced it and it started again.

‘Demanding girlfriend?’ laughed Bridge.

‘Something like that.’

He glanced back over his shoulder, brows low as he studied Pax’s face, then the neon smile switching on for Carly. He seemed very taken with Carly, she’d noticed with a heat-rash feeling in her skin that annoyed her, a misplaced possessiveness.

Confusingly, when she’d looked through the letters and realised the truth, cold with shock, the person Pax had instinctively wanted to tell was Luca. But talking wouldn’t help keep the family secret.

Keep thinking about something else.

She needed a drink. She was boring herself with this need, this weakness, this thinking. She must stop thinking.

In her pocket, her own phone had started buzzing furiously, a full signal flooding her inboxes. She ignored it, not wanting Mack’s vitriol to touch her.

‘Mummy – look!’ Kes was balancing along the low stretch of drystone wall by the gate entrance, Ellis behind him. She hadn’t seen him so happy in months.

I love him. I can’t bear how much I love him. She clapped overhead, grateful for laughter bursting through before tears dared, feeling her rings slip off as she did so, the ‘ice and a slice’ as Bay had called them, too loose on bone-thin fingers to hold on.

They landed silently amid the leafy mulch alongside the tarmac, and she had an overwhelming urge to let them lie there. Her mother had left her rings in the bathroom the day she ran – one Pax’s flame-haired grandmother’s emerald engagement ring, the other a gold band battered from hard riding – equally untreasured. An abandoned marriage, like hers. Her father and Lester. The shock.