She laughed, flushing prettily. ‘Just jumpers and boots. I need chocolate.’ She headed for the fridge and extracted two Mars bars. ‘And codeine.’ With one hand she managed to pop two little white pills out of the blister strip lying on her table and gulped them down with a glass of water before lowering herself carefully onto the sofa and offering him one of the Mars bars.

‘Thanks.’ He let himself down beside her. ‘Have you heard from your sister today?’

She ripped her bar of chocolate open with her teeth. ‘She rang this morning and asked to come over but I said I wasn’t ready to talk yet. She’s very sad and apologetic, full of self-blame, but talking things out with her could take hours I don’t have and we both need to cool off. Unfortunately, the basic facts haven’t changed. She’s being eaten up by what I’m doing.’ She bit off the end of the Mars bar. After she’d chewed and swallowed she added, ‘Even if she’s not being fair, I can’t just ignore how she feels. It’s always been us, you see. Us against a not-very-understanding world. People gossiping or making fun of our two-mums situation, being quite horrible sometimes. We’ve always been a unit, even if we don’t deal with things in the same way. She feels threatened.’

‘By the existence of your brothers?’ Isaac thought he could see that, even though Zinnia wasn’t high on his list of favourite people right now.

‘Exactly.’ Lily sighed. ‘So when I get back from Switzerland I’m going to have to decide where I go from here.’

He digested this. ‘You mean literally? You’ve definitely decided to leave?’

A tear formed on her cheek and she dashed it away. ‘I’ll have done what I set out to do, met my brothers.’

They ate their chocolate. Isaac enjoyed the sugar jolt. He’d hit the ground running this morning and his day was going to be long. ‘So you’ve come up against a lot of negativity about your two mums?’

Lily screwed up the chocolate wrapper. ‘Ohhhhh … loads. I always thought it was better to educate the people who gave us a hard time but Zinnia used to go off like a firework sometimes.’

‘Zinnia has a temper?’ he asked ironically. ‘You amaze me.’