‘It’s okay,’ Amy says. ‘Matt and I can go at the other end, next to Lotte and Theo. You can have the other room here or the one upstairs.’ She’s aware she’s skirting round the real issue: that she’s hardly seen or spoken to her sister for almost a year.

‘This one! I’ll be neighbours with my wicked step-aunt,’ says Chloe.

Bethany flings open the window and takes a photograph of herself with the pool in the background.

‘Come on, girls, let’s get in,’ she says, pulling her top over her head and exposing a flat, toned stomach and a lacy magenta bra.

Chloe giggles and disappears into her room. If Chloe and Bethany are in the downstairs bedrooms, next to the pool, that means Nick and Luca can have the two smaller rooms upstairs. She and Matt and the children can go in the two bedrooms above the sitting room in the other wing of the house. But how typical of Bethany to choose the best room. She doesn’t want to fight with her sister, though – she still isn’t sure she even wants her to be here – so she heads back out to tell Luca where he’ll be staying.

Luca is with Carlo in the kitchen. Just as the pictures showed, it runs the length of one side of the house and opens up into a sitting room; colourful rugs are spread over the sofas, and the side tables look as if they’ve just been bolted together from newly planed wood. It’s clean and everything feels new; but it’s rustic and basic, from the uneven raw floorboards to the plastic Mira shower fittings. Which is good: they can’t afford luxury, and Amy doesn’t think she could deal with it – it would feel wrong. Luca and Carlo are talking rapidly in Italian. Luca would tower over the shorter, stockier teenager, if he didn’t slouch. He turns to her.

‘Carlo has explain me how everything works in the house. I tell to you later.’

‘Thanks, Luca,’ she says.

Carlo says, ‘Ansonaco. Made by mia famiglia Donati.’ He presents her with a bottle of white wine, holding it in both of his hands as if it’s precious.

‘How kind of you,’ she says, taking it from him. The wine is cool in her hands and she slides it into the empty fridge.

He grins at her, his teeth white in his tanned face. Amy finds she’s smiling back, as if her body is going through the motions of being somebody who is happy to be on holiday, delighted to have been given a bottle of wine.

‘What a beautiful house,’ she says, to cover her fading smile, as her mind catches up and she remembers how pointless it all is.

He nods and says something to Luca, then turns back to her. ‘You tell to me if you need anything. Goodbye.’ He shakes her hand.