Glancing now, despite herself, at the space next to the cupboard where the cat bowls had lived until recently. Stupid still to be upset about this, when there were so many awful things going on in the world. Michael had brushed it off a bit when she’d told him.

But she couldn’t help the sadness that surged now as she thought about the comfort that old moggy had been.

The kettle seemed to have boiled already. She wasn’t sure she even felt like a cup of tea now, or the sandwich she was planning to make.

Michael was always nagging her to look after herself properly, but it was difficult, when she was on her own.

She hoped he was alright, whatever he was doing.

What was he doing?

He pretended that he was happy, but she knew he wasn’t, not really. How could they be happy, after what had happened, any of them?

Abandoning all thoughts of tea now, Irene went into the sitting room and picked up the photograph that sat on the mantelpiece. Liam, aged eight, all gappy teeth and sparkling eyes. He was always such a beautiful child. When he was a toddler, people used to stop her to comment on his auburn hair and those big, light brown eyes. Once, when she was up in London for the day visiting her mother, a man in the street gave her a card and said he was from a modelling agency that represented children. Modelling!

Irene had been dying to tell Colin about it when she got home, but he hadn’t been excited at all. He said that Liam already ruled the roost and it wouldn’t do him any favours to make him a bighead. She never called the modelling man.

It was a shameful thing she kept locked away inside; the fact that Liam had always been that tiny bit easier to love than his older brother.

Michael was always sick; always complaining about something or another.

And as an adult, he had all his weird theories about things; that there was a secret group of powerful people who controlled everything we did, that the state was constantly monitoring us. Irene couldn’t really keep up and just humoured him when he went into one of his rants.

Liam, though, seemed to have sprung from her womb raring to go at life. He sparkled with some sort of vitality that pulled you in.