‘He’s a tosser,’ Joe says. ‘Who chats up women in their own homes when delivering pizzas?’

‘Lonely people,’ Cathy says.

They eat in companionable silence, Cathy feeling more relaxed as each minute goes by. Maybe they can learn to forget. Maybe they can eat pizzas and drink wine just the way they used to. Maybe they can take the piss out of their colleague, behind closed doors, be the worst versions of themselves together. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

It’s the same mood as Rosie’s funeral, that volatile mix of panic and gallows humour. Cathy remembers it well. The wake. All their friends and family. Their mother in a stiff nineties skirt suit, their father in a black jacket so dark and old it was a kind of bottle-green. After everybody had left, Cathy, Joe and Frannie had been washing up in the farmhouse kitchen, as they often did. Cathy washed, Joe dried, and Frannie put away, which actually involved Joe putting most of the stuff away because she couldn’t reach. Cathy had glanced towards the ceiling. Their parents were speaking. ‘They said a ten per cent discount,’ their mother was saying.

Joe looked at Cathy in alarm. Their mother continued: ‘And they haven’t applied it. Look – we paid in full for everything, the pizza slices, the cheese and pineapple sticks –’

‘Wow,’ Joe had said, evidently unable to help himself.

Frannie was looking smilingly from Cathy to Joe. ‘What?’ she’d said.

‘Nothing,’ Cathy said quickly. She’d glanced at Joe. ‘Do not,’ she’d said, holding up a hand, her mouth quivering.

‘It’s funeral food,’ Joe said. ‘A discount for … for funeral food.’

‘We’ll go to hell if we laugh,’ Cathy had said. But Joe had already been doubled over with laughter, and Cathy and Frannie soon joined him. ‘God, they’re becoming tight,’ Cathy had said. Over the following years, their mother’s small but sharp traits – frugality, a kind of anxious fussiness – loomed large, while their father seemed to fade away entirely into nothing, repression, quietness, tears on Christmas Day and Rosie’s birthday that he explained away as just feeling a bit under the weather.

Joe, Cathy and Frannie eventually responded the only way adult children can: by withdrawal.

Thinking of their closeness, of how much they have vested in each other, Cathy says, spontaneously to Frannie: ‘Have you told Joe about Jason?’

Frannie’s gaze turns shocked, pizza crust suspended over Joe’s mayo.

‘The lawyer?’ Joe says. Cathy stares and stares at him. ‘We thought it would be good to have someone in case we ever need him,’ he says. Too much explanation. His tone too earnest.

‘So you know who he is.’

‘Yes,’ Joe says.

‘The two of you – but not me,’ she says. She’s burning with it. With the ancient sibling rivalry, the feeling of being left out, but with something else too, something she’s been trying to keep a lid on: resentment. Bitterness. That Frannie did this to her. That she’s in so deep she can’t get out.