‘I’m just not strong enough, Clemmie. I don’t feel strong enough for any of it.’ Penny looked to the ceiling, the tiles of it blurring as she blinked away her misgivings. ‘But for Uncle David I have to pull myself together, don’t I? What is the point of love if your family is falling apart? Family first, right? Look at all he has done for us.’

‘It’s alright,’ Clementine whispered. ‘You don’t have to decide this now. It’s okay. Come on.’

But Penny did have to decide now. She had to decide so much in an instant, and yet, really, truly, the choice had already been made: of course she’d go and run The Red Panda. Of course she would.

‘And the surrogacy …’ Penny said, trailing off. She couldn’t stand to finish the sentence. Whatever trepidation she’d had around it, it was another choice made for her: it would have to wait.

‘I know,’ said Clementine. ‘But the offer isn’t going anywhere. Everything is figureoutable.’

Penny closed her eyes in Clementine’s lap. The tears dried up and she felt an eerie sense of numbness. Her uncle was alive – but there was so much more she would now be losing. She counted to five as she inhaled, and counted the same as she exhaled. It felt like the only thing she had any say over was that. Five in, five out. Five in, five out. She counted until she fell asleep in her sister’s lap.

9

‘You’re sure this is what you want?’

‘Yes.’

‘You want to stop seeing each other?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though we already fell in friendship?’

Penny smiled. She was doing her best to do her best. Trying hard to do the right thing. It hurt, but she couldn’t see any other way.

‘But that’s just it, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that always the point? We can be friends.’

Francesco sat for a moment on Penny’s sofa, chewing his bottom lip and staring at the coffee table. ‘But,’ he said, plainly. ‘I don’t want to be friends. I want to be with you properly.’

Penny had paced up and down the flat, around and around, as she’d waited for him to arrive that evening. He’d stayed with her all day at the hospital and then driven her back that night, once they knew David would be okay. She’d told him in the car on the way down that she was thinking of going up to Havingley, in Derbyshire, to help out as her uncle recovered, but Francesco hadn’t fully understood that she meant that she would move there for the foreseeable future and have Stuart run Bridges. By the time she’d woken up that morning, what needed to happen next was crystal clear to her.