‘Oh, I mean it, English Girl. And our mom? She’ll spit on your dead body and stamp her stiletto hard into your eye socket.’

‘OK.’

‘And our brother Nicolas? He’ll set your fuckin’ bones alight. And our uncles are cops and they’ll prolly help us hide your body.’

I laughed. She didn’t. ‘I wouldn’t want to hurt him, Liv. Unless he hurts me. Then I’ll probably have to… I don’t know, cut off his dick, slice up his torso in a bathtub and bury the bastard in the flowerbeds.’

She threw me a look which I couldn’t read before bursting into laughter which bounced off the hotel walls. She reached for my hand and squeezed it. ‘You get me, that’s a good start. You fuckin’ get me. Cuntasaurus never got my humour.’

‘You want to track down the old C-Rex and tie her to the back of a truck, maybe drag her around for a while?’ I suggested.

She pursed her lips. ‘Gimme the keys, Thelma. Just gimme the keys.’

Friday, 10 May – the beachfront, Rocas Calientes

‘Hey, try this,’ said Raf, handing me a bag with six warm dough balls inside it when I met him on the beachfront that morning. ‘Freshly baked.’

And even though I was full, the warm ball was, indeed, all of the noms and a few hundred more. Chocolate oozed out of the centres.

‘Oh, my Christ. You could kill me right now and bury me inside a giant one of these and I’d probably wake up and thank you.’ We were sitting on the low wall separating the beach from the sidewalk and I kicked my feet against the concrete. I was like a kid again.

Raf laughed, way more than people usually laugh at one of my jokes. He laughed at a lot of my jokes. This helped the fancying thing a lot.

‘How the hell do you eat so much and not put on weight?’ I asked.

‘I work out, not to excess just to trim off the extra. I enjoy it. My mom says, Si no estás comiendo, no eres feliz.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘If you’re not eating, you’re not happy. Food brings us together. We eat, we grow, we share, it makes us strong. It enriches us.’

‘She’s not a fan of dieting, I take it, your mum?’

He frowned. ‘Ninguna perra flaca te va a complacer, mijo. Basically, don’t truck with skinny bitches, son. She never liked my ex-wife Tina so I guess she was right. Says they starve their brains like they starve their men.’

‘I like your mum.’