‘So you must be Lorcan,’ she said. It was a statement not a question. ‘Your grandad told me you were coming to stay. He just didn’t say when.’

‘Well, erm… yesterday, as it happens,’ Lorcan said, gingerly lowering his makeshift weapon. ‘And Grandad just nipped home to change his shoes. Said he put on the wrong ones and they were giving him bother.’

Jo sagged with relief, delighted that Harry wasn’t ill as she had feared. She’d grown even closer to him since his heart attack and dreaded the thought of anything bad happening to him.

‘He was wearing the brown shoes?’ Jo smiled, being all too familiar with Harry’s issues with the brown shoes, which she had told him, repeatedly, to just throw away.

‘That’s the problem with you young ones nowadays,’ Harry had opined, launching into one of his famous lectures. ‘You think anything that’s not perfect or that’s got a bit old should be tossed on the rubbish pile, but you’ll learn in time. You’re young yet.’

‘Yes,’ Lorcan replied, incredulously. ‘How did you know?’

‘I think everyone on this lane knows about your grandad’s brown shoes – at least everyone who shops in here does. Which, thinking on it, is just about everyone who lives on Ivy Lane.’

‘And you know about me too?’ he asked. He looked as confused as if he’d just stepped into some alien world. His brow was furrowed and Jo was sure he’d broken into a bit of a sweat. He pushed his blonde, wavy hair back from his face and looked at her.

‘Oh yes. We know all about you,’ she said.

‘You do realise how sinister that sounds when it’s said in a Northern Irish accent?’ Lorcan asked, but there was, at least, a hint of humour there.

‘Oh yes. I realise. It’s a tool we like to use here with the blow-ins from time to time.’

As she looked at him, she could see shades of Harry in his mannerisms. The way he tilted his head to the side, the curve of his smile. He may have been a good fifty years his grandad’s junior but they definitely had the same twinkle in their eyes. Jo could see at once that Harry must’ve been very handsome in his youth. Although she doubted he would have opted for the same baggy jeans and oversized sweatshirt that Lorcan wore. Not that Jo was paying too much attention to what he was wearing, or what he looked like. Or that he wasn’t at all the childlike wet wipe she had been expecting.