Cathy goes to Frannie’s fridge while she and Tom sit at her large table, where a thousand things went wrong before. She watches them for a moment, the garden a blaze of flowers behind them. You’d never know.

She gets out a bottle of wine and some sparkling water and mixes spritzers.

As she’s making them, listening to the chit-chat of Frannie and Tom, to Paul’s constant dinosaur commentary, she sees something poking out from underneath a bottle of merlot.

It’s a calendar, the kind you get for Christmas, notecards in a stack that you rip off. It’s ripped to today’s date, 21 June. Each day is neatly crossed off with red pen. At the end of the month, on the 30th, in Frannie’s handwriting, something is written: 6,112 days left. Cathy does the maths quickly and easily. It’s the remaining time on Joe’s sentence. She flicks to July: 6,081 at the end of that month.

She stares at it, tears filling her eyes. At this evidence, here, of her sister’s longing, her sister’s guilt, her sister’s love. Life will resume, for Frannie, when he’s out.

She reaches for the pen that’s lying nearby and crosses off today, for Joe, for her sister, for her family.

It’s not so long. They can wait.

Acknowledgements

I am unable to stick to a brief, and so, before I write out my acknowledgements, I want to tell a small story.

It was a cloudy, close day in July 2020. I was standing outside the vets’ (there is a reason this book is about a vets’ and that is probably because it is one of the few places I have been to in 2020!). My retriever, Wendy, had jumped into a pond and taken a few gulps of what I now knew to be poisonous blue-green algae. I was waiting – outside, as per pandemic life – to be told if she would recover, and waiting to see how my book How to Disappear had sold. To be honest, I am not ashamed to say that both were of equal importance to me. That is the writer’s life: you care so very much.

I kid you not, both pieces of news came at the same time. The vet poked her head around the door and said, ‘She’s going to be fine!’ just as I got the email to say How to Disappear had sold 9,000 paperbacks in its first week on sale and was at No. 8 in the UK charts, despite bookshops having only just reopened, despite the pandemic, despite, despite, despite.

I looked up at the white sky, phone in my hand, dog lead in the other, and thought I was so happy I might burst. And so first of all to you, my loyal readers, thank you for buying How to Disappear in your many thousands; thank you for making that hard day turn great.

This novel was written in the strangest of circumstances, set before a pandemic, in one of the worst-hit regions of Italy. I hope you will forgive me for omitting the unpleasant reality in which we currently live, in hope of better times in the future, when we look back on coronavirus and say, ‘Thank God that’s over.’