‘Well – I just … there is no next step, is there?’ he says, looking across at Frannie, who’s messing with the buttons on her denim jacket, all that hair piled up on the top of her head. ‘We can’t exactly rob a bank.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Frannie says quietly, tears pooling in her eyes that disappear with a blink, like she’s become adept at suppressing her emotions.

Frannie’s phone rings, breaking the atmosphere, and she answers it. Joe turns to Cathy and shrugs helplessly, in that way that he does sometimes, like Frannie is a child they are co-parenting. Cathy keeps busying herself, cleaning the front desk, running the cloth along the keyboard, between the mouse and the chip-and-PIN machine. Joe turns off the television, the rolling news gone for another day, and a sigh builds and escapes from Cathy as he does it.

She thinks of Tom as she cleans and as Joe straightens the products on the shelves and Frannie murmurs into the phone. It’s probably Deb.

Something changes in the reception and Cathy’s back immediately tenses. ‘What did she just say?’ Joe is shouting, and when Cathy looks up he’s cornering Frannie, right against the door to Cathy’s consultation room.

‘What are you doing?’ Cathy says.

Frannie is chuntering frantically at Joe. The phone is now somehow in his hands. It’s happened too fast, like an altercation in a night club that nobody can quite pinpoint the beginning of.

‘You’ve told her,’ Joe says, after hanging up the phone. His tone is completely without emotion. There is nothing positive or negative contained in it. Only a strange kind of empty factualness which scares Cathy. He’s so big these days, her brother. Chest like a drum. He’s holding Frannie’s phone and standing over her like a bouncer.

‘No,’ Frannie says.

‘Joe,’ Cathy says. ‘What are you doing?’

‘He’s a bully,’ Frannie shouts.

‘She said I’ve been reading about Will,’ Joe roars. ‘She knows, doesn’t she?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Frannie bleats, her eyes finding Cathy’s over Joe’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘How could you?’ he says. ‘We have just finished dealing with the fucking fall-out of one person, and now a second? What. The. Fuck?’ His face has turned red, the whites of his eyes shining unnaturally in the light. He looks so different. He looks like a thug.

‘What – I’m supposed to just forget it? Not need my friends to confide in?’ Frannie says.

‘It didn’t happen,’ screams Joe. ‘That’s what we have to do. Live it. Live the lie. There are no bribes. There are no threats.’ He meets her eyes. ‘There is no body.’

‘But I can’t. I can’t,’ Frannie says. She is trembling and crying. Cathy can’t stop looking at her. If only. If fucking only. ‘They’re going to come for us, when they find him, aren’t they?’

‘No!’ Joe roars. ‘They didn’t take our DNA.’ He yells it right into her face. ‘They’ll see it was a hit-and-run. There’s no CCTV out there. Nobody will know. Except, for some reason, you keep telling people.’