And now came the reading of the will. In his office, Mr Gatiss the family solicitor read it out to Harlan and Milly. Milly was so dazed that for a long while none of the dry legal words he was spouting even registered. Then she saw Harlan sitting there with a big shit-eating grin on his face and said: ‘What?’

Patiently, Mr Gatiss pushed his half-moon specs up his nose and read the will again.

This time, Milly paid closer attention. The gist of it was, Harlan got everything. Everything. Milly got an allowance, thirty grand a year, that was all. The rest went straight to Harlan. Charlie and Nula’s entire fortune. The houses. The cash. The business. The nightclubs. The boats, the cars. The whole damned lot.

She sat there and thought of course.

She’d never been rated. She was just a girl. Harlan was the boy, the favoured one, heir to Charlie Stone’s empire. She thought of coming downstairs to proudly display her first teenage party dress and Charlie saying, crushing her in an instant: ‘Well no one’s ever going to call her Twiggy, are they?’

Subtlety had never been Charlie’s strong suit. Mum had thumped his arm, shushing him, but Milly had got the message, loud and clear. She looked a mess. She was a mess. Fat and ugly. But Harlan? For Charlie, everything perfectly dressed and handsome Harlan did was OK. Nothing had ever changed that for Charlie, not even when Nula had started to hate Harlan and fear him.

For Charlie, Harlan could do no wrong. And here was proof of it.

Milly drove into town that night and went to one of the nightclubs Dad had owned. Now it was Harlan’s. She ordered a Bloody Mary at the bar and then stood there, wondering what the fuck she was doing here amid the deafening noise of Diana Ross belting ‘Chain Reaction’ out of the sound system. She downed the drink and ordered another. Then she felt a bit sick. She wasn’t much of a drinker. But she drank the alcohol because it numbed the pain.

Feeling hazy, she stumbled off toward the ladies and stood and stared at her face in the mirror, noting that her potato-shaped nose – thanks, Mum! – was shiny with grease, her lipstick gone. She dabbed powder on and added a slick of lipstick. Better. Well, a bit. Other girls were pushing in alongside her in the cramped loos, and a black-haired beauty with hard, knowing eyes came up beside her and met Milly’s gaze in the mirror. She was exactly the sort of girl who’d always frightened Milly, reminding her of the snobby tomboy girls at school and at the stables, the ones who’d bullied her.

‘Need a livener then?’ the girl asked with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. She had a tiny square of cellophane in her hand, a couple of pills inside. ‘Tenner?’