The stress of it all pushed Rebecca to consider resigning, but as soon as she mentioned those words, Alastair and her father went off like a Catherine wheel, spitting, hissing, and spinning in circles. Her eyes looked to the cupboard under the sink, the place where she thought every housewife hid her booze. Her husband certainly wouldn’t look there: he didn’t even know where the kitchen sink was.

Just as she bent down and opened the cupboard, a crashing sound made her jump. Spinning round, she almost lost her balance. There, giving her an unwelcome sneer, stood Kendall. The noise was from her daughter flinging her rucksack onto the worktop. Like her sisters, Kendall had not an ounce of respect for her.

Usually, she would have offered her daughter a drink or something to eat, but not this evening, though; she was sick to the back teeth of pussyfooting around Kendall. So, instead, she sneered back and tutted.

‘So, tell me, Mother, who exactly is your puppetmaster?’

Rebecca tilted her head to the side with a questioning expression. Silently, she wondered why she’d ever bothered to take Kendall away from her father. She should have left her there. There was not a smidgen of her own genes in the girl – not in looks, attitude, not even in interests. If she didn’t look so much like her real father, Rebecca would have sworn she’d been swapped at birth.

‘Kendall, I have no idea what you’re talking about, and, to be quite frank, I really don’t care!’

She turned away from her daughter and searched for the bottle of Bombay Sapphire. Pulling a tumbler from the top shelf, she poured a generous helping and took two large gulps. So uptight and angry, she didn’t bother to add the tonic; instead, she swallowed more of the bitter, clear liquid and smarted as it ripped the back of her throat. After taking a deep breath, she looked up at her daughter, who appeared to be stunned. Well, she would be; she’d never seen her mother do that before – she’d thought her too straight-laced to knock back neat gin.

‘What’s up, Mother? Did you find Alastair with another woman?’ she scoffed.

Rebecca stared at her daughter’s ridiculing eyes and was hit by overwhelming anger that shot up from her feet to the top of her head. Instantly, she threw the glass tumbler at the wall, and then, with both hands, she wiped the centre island clear, sending the vase, the condiments, and Kendall’s rucksack flying to the floor.