Up until Anna’s death, all I’d heard about my ex-husband were bits and pieces of information that Martha passed on from Cece. For a year or two after I left Joe, Martha kept trying to tell me about his mental health issues and so on, but I wouldn’t listen. In fact, I used to get quite angry with her. ‘Why are you even telling me these things?’ I’d say. ‘I don’t care about Joe. Really, I don’t!’

I knew he was running his own gardening business in North Wales and as far as Martha was aware he didn’t have a new partner: like me, he’d never come anywhere close to marrying again. I assumed he was better now – he’d sounded quite coherent in the emails he’d sent in the past few weeks. Still, this whole situation was ridiculous. It was a stipulation of Anna’s will that Joe and I meet the lawyer together, but we had flown in separately and we should have arranged to make our way separately to the lawyer’s office in the city of Ragusa. It had been a stupid idea to meet at the airport. It had been a stupid plan to share a car. What on earth would we talk about? How could we bear to be together?

I typed a reply.

You go on ahead, I’ll follow in a taxi.

My finger hovered over the ‘send’ button. I didn’t actually know how much a taxi would cost or if Sicilian taxi drivers had the facility to accept card payments and I didn’t speak Italian so I wouldn’t be able to ask. I wouldn’t know if I was being charged a fair price for the journey, I didn’t even know where Ragusa was in relation to the airport. What if it was 200 miles away? Why hadn’t I looked it up beforehand? Why hadn’t I thought this through? Did they even have Ubers in Sicily?

I deleted the text without sending it. My heart was thumping. My breathing was ragged. I heard Fitz’s voice in my head: One foot in front of the other, dear heart. One step at a time.