Liv started to say something, but I punched the words in harder till she gave up and shut her face. “I feel sick here, Liv, physically sick. This is the one place where I thought I could rely on you to back me up. You always thought my family wasn’t good enough for you. What the hell makes them good enough for Holly?”

Olivia finally lost the rag. “When did I ever say that, Frank? When?”

I stared. She was white with anger, hands pressed back against the door, breathing hard. “If you think your family isn’t good enough, if you’re ashamed of them, then that’s your problem, not mine. Don’t you put it on me. I never once said that. I never thought it. Never.”

She whipped around and grabbed the door open. It shut behind her with a click that, if it hadn’t been for Holly, would have been a house-shaking slam.

I sat there for a while, gawping at the door like a cretin and feeling my brain cells whiz-bang like dodgem cars. Then I picked up the wine bottle, found another glass and went after Olivia.

She was in the conservatory, on the wicker sofa, with her legs curled under her and her hands tucked deep into her sleeves. She didn’t look up, but when I held out a glass to her she disentangled a hand and took it. I poured us each a quantity of wine that could have drowned a small animal and sat down next to her.

It was still raining, patient relentless drops pattering off the glass, and a cold draft was filtering in at some crack and spreading like smoke through the room—I caught myself making a mental note, even after all this time, to find the crack and caulk it over. Olivia sipped her wine and I watched her reflection in the glass, shadowed eyes concentrating on something only she could see. After a while I asked, “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Her head didn’t turn. “About what?”

“All of it. But let’s start with why you never told me my family didn’t bother you.”

She shrugged. “You never seemed particularly anxious to discuss them. And I didn’t think it needed saying. Why would I have a problem with people I’ve never met?”

“Liv,” I said. “Do me a favor: don’t play dumb. I’m too tired for that. We’re in Desperate Housewives country, here—in a conservatory, for fuck’s sake. It’s far from conservatories I was reared. My family is more along the Angela’s Ashes lines. While your lot sit in the conservatory sipping Chianti, my lot are off in their tenement deciding which greyhound to blow the dole money on.”