Mia understood that some days it was easier for her mum to let Jess sit in the house all day, because the argument and the fallout were too much to take. There were enough times when Mia wanted to do the same, so she didn’t blame her mum for giving in. But she also thought she’d been relenting too much lately, giving in to her eldest daughter’s behaviour, and it was a downward spiral. Anyone could see that. Even their mum must.

‘It’s like Jess is a child again,’ she had told Mia once. ‘It’s hard enough to deal with a three-year-old when she won’t do what’s best for her, but at least then you can pick her up and strap her into the car when you need to go out. How am I supposed to do that with Jess? She’s an adult now. She’s thirty-seven.

‘Of course Jess wasn’t ever that bad as a little one,’ she had gone on, and Mia knew what was coming. ‘You were the rascal. The one who refused to go to bed, who would lie on the floor of the supermarket, kicking and screaming. Look at us now,’ she had said, her words fading to a whisper. ‘You don’t expect this.’

Mia hated that her mum was living this life. She was sixty-eight. She had been about to give up her part-time job at Sainsbury’s a year ago; she’d wanted to take a pottery course. The flyer had been pinned to the fridge for as long as Mia had been back at home. But everything had been put on hold. For Jess.

‘I’m going to try my best, Mum,’ Mia said as she folded the tea towel and laid it carefully on the draining board. ‘It’s such a gorgeous day, and we don’t have to go anywhere too crowded.’

‘No, no, of course, but don’t …’ Her mum paused again.

‘I won’t push it,’ Mia said, biting her tongue. As she wandered out of the kitchen and towards Jess’s bedroom at the far end of the hall in the bungalow, she knew that if she couldn’t get her sister to agree to go to the pub for lunch, then their mum wouldn’t go, either. She wouldn’t want to leave Jess on her own – not on a day like this. Sunny Saturdays were always so much worse. And yet the thought of them all sitting inside made Mia’s fingers curl as she rapped on the closed door and gently pushed it open.

Jess was facing away from her, her finger outstretched, running along the line of her heaving bookcase, until she stopped at one volume and tugged it out. Mia peered closer. Wuthering Heights. Such a depressing book, in Mia’s mind, yet Jess was drawn to reading it time and time again.