‘You’ll never come out.’ Frannie turned towards him, buried her head in Joe’s chest. ‘You can’t. You’ll get fifty years. I can’t do – I can’t do fifty years without you.’

He shrugged against her, looking down at her, then across at Cathy. ‘I love you,’ he said simply to Frannie, his voice fractured and broken. ‘I love you.’

‘What’s the crime?’ Jason says now.

‘My brother, Joe,’ Cathy says. ‘I think he killed somebody on our holiday.’

74.

Now

One Hundredth Meeting with Frannie

It’s visiting hours at the hospital. My body is scanned, frisked, signed in. I have to confirm I have nothing dangerous with me. Sellotape. Pens. Knives. Drugs.

It smells of the specific smell that I know to be where my sister currently calls home. Vegetable soup. Sweat. Old clothes. Human stuff. Mundane stuff.

Frannie is waiting for me in her room. She’s sitting up on the bed in a patch of bright winter sunlight, reading a novel. She’s taken to reading at least two a week, something I’ve never really known her do in adulthood.

She has gained three stone in weight and been treated for major depressive disorder, triggered – though nobody really knows the full story – by the events in Verona. She is now almost ready for release from the institution we paid to get her into, and speaks with a wisdom, sometimes, that unlocks something for me often in the car on the way home.

‘How’s Paul?’ she says as soon as I enter the room.

‘Good – he’s good. He’s finger-painting at nursery,’ I say. And then I add: ‘It’s done.’

Frannie knows exactly what I mean. There may be triple locks on the double doors, but my sister is still – gloriously so – my sister, in here. It is not as I thought it would be. There is no heavy, sombre feeling. There is no shame or madness. Only people who have been dealt hard hands by life, by their mental health, by their brains, and sympathetic nurses trained to ease the wounds in their psyches. It is a more comforting place than most, because this is recognized and accepted and treated, not hidden away as it is elsewhere.

‘Did you look for my post?’ she says.

‘Yes, only an ASOS catalogue.’

Frannie smiles a half-smile. ‘Did you bring it?’ she says hopefully.

I toss it out of my handbag at her, and she places it very deliberately and squarely on her bedside table, like she is looking forward to it, this small treat for later. That very small and optimistic action makes something happy move around my heart and down my arms.

She’s aged in hospital. I notice it now that I no longer see her every day. She looks like a woman approaching her mid thirties. Forehead lines. Rounded brackets stretching either side of her nose to her mouth, despite the weight gain. Frannie has sacrificed her beauty to what happened in Verona.

‘Are you pleased you did it?’ she says, squinting as she looks up at me, folding out the novel spine like a butterfly across the cover of her bed.