As she’s choosing a topping for her pancakes and trying to distract Paul with the knobs on the serving cabinet, she sees two shadows at the door. Men in hats, weapons on their belts. She stops for just a second and looks at them, a dark cloak of dread drawing over her shoulders.

‘Let’s go and chat to those nice men,’ she says to Paul, praying that these are not the men who cautioned Joe the other night, and praying too that they haven’t come across him more recently.

‘Nice?’ he says, with a toothy grin, pointing to the exact centre of his chest.

‘You’re nice, yes,’ she laughs.

‘I nice!’ The full sentence bursting free from him surprises her, and she feels something pleasurable bubble up through her.

‘No one is as nice as you,’ she says. She picks him up, breathes in the lavender biscuit smell of the folds of his neck, abandons the warm plate of pancakes, and approaches the police. ‘Is everything okay?’ she says, not even attempting Italian.

‘Sorry?’ one of the Carabinieri says to her. He has high cheekbones, large eyes, heavy lidded. Black hair under his hat. His face is expressionless. Not kind or unkind.

‘I – I just wondered … why you are here,’ she says, trying to enunciate. ‘I can’t find the people I’m staying with,’ she says with a tiny laugh. ‘I just wondered – that they’re okay.’

‘Their names?’ the policeman says to her in perfect, almost accent-less English.

‘Plant. My husband – Joe Plant.’

‘Joe Plant,’ the policeman says slowly.

Lydia fell in love with his name first. A simple name for a boy that was anything but. It was Easter, and she was sixteen. He was eighteen. He hung out only with his sisters on his lunch breaks at school. She once heard him say that all the other students were twats, that he wanted to be a vet because he liked animals and hated people, a stance Lydia could get on board with.

He enjoyed science and wore trainers even though the uniform code said shoes. One evening, she got her Nokia 3210 and went up to her bedroom and sat on the bed and texted him. He replied – about homework – in a perfunctory way, and she replied to him, and it had stopped there. Lydia had sat, cross-legged and disappointed, on the latest bed in the latest foster home, until he had sent another message. That is, Lydia believes, when she fell in love. When that strong, simple name flashed up on her phone unexpectedly. Joe Plant.

And so Lydia has loved Joe for more than half of her life. When he was twenty, and she was eighteen, he had finally asked her to go out for burgers with him. He’d been unable to hold back when the waitress asked if they’d like a table – that was the idea, yeah – but he was not caustic with Lydia. That was the day she entered the inner sanctum and discovered the real Joe. The Joe who falls in love with dying dogs, the Joe who can’t resist sarcastic remarks but then calls himself an arse on the way home from parties, the Joe who sometimes drinks too much, the Joe who gets angry at people who can’t afford to pay for their pets’ treatments and then operates anyway, for free.