“It always is. The squad can survive without you for two days, Frank. No matter what you’d like to think, you’re not indispensable.”

To anyone more than a foot away, her voice would have sounded light and chatty, but she was furious. Tinkling cutlery, arch hoots of laughter; something that sounded like, God help us, a fountain. “It’s not work this time,” I said. “It’s family.”

“It is, of course. Would this have anything to do with the fact that I’m on my fourth date with Dermot?”

“Liv, I would happily do a lot to wreck your fourth date with Dermot, but I’d never give up time with Holly. You know me better than that.”

A short, suspicious pause. “What kind of family emergency?”

“I don’t know yet. Jackie rang me in hysterics, from my parents’ place; I can’t work out the details. I need to get over there fast.”

Another pause. Then Olivia said, on a long tired breath, “Right. We’re in the Coterie. Drop her down.”

The Coterie has a TV-based chef and gets hand-jobbed in a lot of weekend supplements. It badly needs firebombing. “Thanks, Olivia. Seriously. I’ll pick her up later tonight, if I can, or tomorrow morning. I’ll ring you.”

“You do that,” Olivia said. “If you can, of course,” and she hung up. I threw my smoke away and went inside to finish pissing off the women in my life.

Holly was sitting cross-legged on her bed, with the computer on her lap and a worried look on her face. “Sweetheart,” I said, “we’ve got a problem.”

She pointed at the laptop. “Daddy, look.”

The screen said, in big purple letters surrounded by an awful lot of flashing graphics, YOU WILL DIE AT THE AGE OF 52. The kid looked really upset. I sat down on the bed behind her and pulled her and the computer onto my lap. “What’s all this?”

“Sarah found this quiz online and I did it for you and it said this. You’re forty-one.”

Oh, Jesus, not now. “Chickadee, it’s the internet. Anyone can put anything on there. That doesn’t make it real.”

“It says! They figured it all out!”

Olivia was going to love me if I gave Holly back in tears. “Let me show you something,” I said. I reached around her, got rid of my death sentence, opened up a Word document and typed in, YOU ARE A SPACE ALIEN. YOU ARE READING THIS ON THE PLANET BONGO. “Now. Is that true?”

Holly managed a watery giggle. “Course not.”

I turned it purple and gave it a fancy font. “How about now?”

Head-shake.

“How about if I got the computer to ask you a bunch of questions before it said that? Would it be true then?”

For a second I thought I’d got through, but then those narrow shoulders went rigid. “You said a problem.”