Lucia’s eyes filled. ‘Zia-Lucia, she said, “I only have a few days left here anyway,” and—’ Lucia had to pause to blow her nose ‘—and “in my real life, Ursula is all I have”.’ A sob convulsed Lucia’s throat. She covered her face, shoulders shaking. ‘We let her keep to the shadows so she didn’t upset the family.’

His legs failing him, he half-fell into a chair, realising with sickening clarity that he’d helped make Zia feel that way too. ‘I let her think my home’s the most important thing to me,’ he murmured.

They’d all played their part in letting her believe that Ursula was all she had.

Never had anything ever felt so final. And she hadn’t even said a proper goodbye.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Zia had been home for a month. Her spare room was once again ‘Ursula’s room’, which was the least she could do. Stephan had locked Ursula out of her own home for blowing up at him about blabbing details of Zia’s life to Brendon. Stephan had responded with a bitter ‘marriage over!’ plunging Ursula into the black despair that had led her to the paracetamol bottle.

After Ursula had left hospital with no lasting damage to major organs but a psychiatric appointment to keep, she’d spent a week gathering her strength before Zia accompanied her to a solicitor’s office. Any day now Stephan would discover that in the twenty-first century changing the locks to keep your wife out didn’t entitle you to keep her half of the house. Already two of Ursula’s most alternative, tattooed colleagues had accompanied her to fetch her personal possessions from the erstwhile marital home, positioning themselves between her and Stephan and wearing poisonous glares that Ursula said, in a flash of her old self, ‘quite took the fucker aback’.

In helping make life bearable for her friend Zia had kept her mind from her own life’s unbearableness – especially Piero never responding to her goodbye text.

Not a word.

She’d checked compulsively, not sure whether to expect a Hey, that’s a shitty way to say goodbye! or OK. I understand. At least we can still be friends. Or, what she secretly hoped for: I’m not letting us end like this. We must be able to make this work. Apply for temporary residency. Three months will soon pass … Yeah, right. ‘Can’t live without you’ messages were a bit Hollywood. Zia hadn’t sent him one, even though it was what was written in her heart, because here she was, living without him. Her sadness was like lead-lined guts but she was breathing and eating so she was living without him.

She’d got as far as a second interview for a job she quite fancied with an investment company and was sure the raw feelings of loss would go eventually, if she kept busy enough.