Jenna is on her third glass of wine and the tension she’s been feeling all day is finally beginning to ease. Outside, the sky is black, the solar lamps around the pool puddling the ground with a warm, orange glow. She rests her head against the seat back and looks lazily at the painting on the opposite wall, her gaze soft, her thoughts hundreds of miles away, circling around the little world she made for herself: a rented studio flat in East London and a small room in a private physiotherapy clinic nearby. She thinks about Friday night drinks in Clapham Common, cinema trips and holidays, spending almost every penny she earns so she doesn’t have to return to the tiny space she calls home. Her mum’s been needling her for years, telling her to stop renting and buy a flat but Jenna keeps putting it off. She’s done everything else her parents expected of her – she took the A levels they suggested, studied for a degree they approved of and moved to an area of London they felt was suitable – but buying a flat felt like putting a lock on the cage she was living in. She could never give up her job if she had a mortgage to pay, never throw caution to the wind and give it all up to travel the world with a single rucksack and the clothes on her back. Not that she would have done that because her parents wouldn’t have approved. What they wanted, what they expected, of her, was to do a respectable job, marry a respectable man and give them grandchildren. Do what Fran didn’t, that was the implication; the burden of the second child.

Fran had escaped. She was carving her own path through life before Jenna had even pulled up the straps of her first training bra but there was a part of Jenna that relished the spotlight of her parents’ attention. She eavesdropped their conversations and made mental notes as they bitterly complained about her sister’s wilfulness, selfishness and independent streak. She would be nothing like Fran, she decided. She would be a good girl – kind, helpful and obedient. She’d never let them down.

But it was hot under the spotlight – stifling and suffocating – and she longed to creep into the shadows, just for a break. She staged small acts of rebellion – a tattoo of a ladybird on her left hip, binge drinking, one night stands with unsuitable men – but her parents never found out and Jenna’s ‘last great hope’ halo remained.