All this anxiety was his mother’s fault. Anna DeLuca was the reason why I was on this plane and why Joe was waiting for me at the airport in Sicily. She was behind this, she couldn’t leave us alone, she had to be interfering in our lives, pulling our strings, moving us around like the pieces on a chessboard, even now, months after her death. Hadn’t she ruined our lives enough already? Hadn’t she caused enough heartache? Martha had said Anna’s death would be a line drawn in the sand for me, but Martha had been wrong. I thought of Anna’s small, heart shaped face, her black hair, her pretty brown eyes and little white teeth, the peppermints she used to freshen her breath, and the old fury began to rise in me.

I was distracted by the passenger beside me, who knocked my arm as he reached for his seat belt.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘so sorry.’ His jumper slid off his lap and landed on my feet. It was unpleasantly warm. Surreptitiously, I kicked it back towards him. ‘I’m all fingers and thumbs,’ he said. ‘I don’t like take-offs and landings. Always make me nervous.’ He laughed uneasily.

I moved closer to the window, turning my body away from his. I didn’t like flying either. Last time, I’d sworn ‘never again’ and yet here I was, on a journey I hadn’t planned, going to a place I didn’t want to visit, brittle with nerves, resenting the time and energy I was expending, dreading what was to come, and all because of her, Anna DeLuca, and her stupid, manipulative will.

The intercom pinged and the pilot informed us that we’d be landing in fifteen minutes. She said the weather in Sicily was a fine and sunny twenty-five degrees. Good, I thought. It would be nice to have some sunshine. The British weather had been dull in the weeks since Anna’s death and I’d been out of sorts. Nothing had gone terribly wrong, but nothing had been right either. I’d felt as if I had a persistent hangover, or jet lag; some affliction that dulled my mind and slowed me down. It was knowing that this trip was coming; knowing I had to use my precious holiday allocation to come to Sicily to meet Anna’s lawyer; knowing I’d have to burn energy dealing with whatever mess Anna had left for me and Joe to clear up.