Jo should’ve predicted this would happen. In Clara's own room, they had blackout curtains very much designed to fool Clara into thinking it was still night-time when it wasn’t. They were a must as the brighter mornings came to pass. However, the curtains in Jo’s own room did little to stop the sunlight pouring in.

‘It’s a wee bit early, darling. You could go back to sleep, or read one of your books for another wee half-hour or so,’ Jo tried. Sometimes it worked. More often than not, it didn’t. Clara was a person who liked company and most certainly was not fond of entertaining herself so she responded to Jo’s plea by pulling the duvet onto the floor.

Jo knew she could have called her mum to come and take over, but she thought of how upset she had looked the night before, and she couldn’t bring herself to be that cruel.

She pulled herself up to sitting and stretched. Her eyes were tired and dry from staring at her Kindle all night and her body screamed to be allowed to rest, but Clara and her desire for waffles with strawberries and maple syrup for breakfast screamed louder.

‘Would you not just have a bowl of porridge? It will set you up for the day?’ Jo asked her little sister, who gave her a ‘are you serious’ glare in return.

‘Mammy always makes me waffles and syrup on a Monday before all week at school,’ she said, her brow furrowed in determination.

‘Okay, so waffles it is, with extra strawberries,’ Jo said.

She knew there was little point in arguing with Clara, so Jo pulled on her kimono and slippers, tied her hair into a messy topknot and yawned her way down the stairs. The first thing she did was put on a very large pot of coffee. As she was up, she might as well let her mum enjoy a proper lie-in and take care of the school run too. And, she supposed, she could nip to the supermarket and stock up on some essentials. The kind of essentials that Harry didn’t have in his shop because he had taken against them for some reason. Energy drinks weren’t the only things on his blacklist. He didn’t sell dishwasher tablets (‘only shirkers have dishwashers, nothing wrong with a bottle of Fairy Liquid’), kitchen roll (‘whatever happened to people just using dishcloths to clean up after themselves. What a waste’) and wholemeal bread (‘I’ve never had a slice of brown bread in my life and I’m here and grand, aren’t I?’). She wondered how he would react if someone asked for avocado or quinoa, or if he would even know what they were.