I searched the diary again. I was missing something. I knew that I was. There was something I needed to know to make sense of it all; some clue I didn’t yet have.

I reread an account of a day the three friends – Anna, Matilde and Gina – had spent on the beach. They’d taken a picnic prepared by Signora Ganzaria – the food described in detail – and played beach ball. After that, they’d gone for a swim. I’d skimmed the entry before, finding it insignificant. Now I read on.

Anna had written:

The sea was so cold that my hands were blue when I came out. G blew on them to warm them and wrapped her towel around us both like a blanket.

‘G’. Not Gabriele, Gina.

Here was another one:

Gina and I went to Ragusa on the bus. We climbed to the Giardini Iblei & G made some sketches of me. She’s going to paint a portrait of me for my birthday!

Gina! It was Gina who had painted Anna’s portrait! I smiled at the picture, propped against the wall.

I flicked through more pages:

Matilde came over today. Mama invited her to stay the night. She’s sleeping in my bed now and I am by the window writing my diary by moonlight. I’d rather be here, on the chair. I don’t like sleeping beside Matilde. She’s such a fidget. I miss Gina. I wish she was here.

Two days later, a local builder brought his labourer down to the villa to look at the swimming pool and discuss plans for demolishing the old one, built in the 1920s, and replacing it with a modern pool, which Anna described in her diary:

Two interlocking circles, one deep, one shallow, with a sloping shelf linking the two, & tiled steps into the water at the shallow end. There’ll be filters & a pump house, systems for keeping the water clean. It’s going to be ‘state of the art’ according to Papa. The best pool in Sicily, he says.

One of the labourer’s boys, Anna reported, was a good-looking young man called Gabriele Arnone:

He has taken a shine to G & G has been playing along.

Slowly, slowly, the penny dropped. My mind shifted as I reordered Anna’s story, mentally crossed out what I’d believed up to that point and wrote a different version. Because if ‘G’ was Gina and not Gabriele, then everything I’d read before had been misinterpreted, everything I thought I knew had been wrong.

I read on: