I saw Noah turn his head to see how close his sister was getting to him and then he tumbled, head over heels, landing in a crumpled heap on the sand. My heart was in my mouth. I can’t bear to see them hurt themselves and I leapt to my feet, ready to rush over there and give him a special Mummy hug, but there was no need. Poppy had got to him and was sitting him up, smoothing his hair and putting her ear to his chest. She looked so silly that he forgot about crying. He was lucky to have such a great big sister, although really I knew there wasn’t an iota of luck about it. I’d put my heart and soul into bringing them up right.

And then Clio popped into my head yet again. She had mentioned a brother, though not by name. Maybe they didn’t have such a great relationship as my two. That would fit with what I thought I knew about Clio so far. I’d got the impression that her family weren’t that close. It was ironic really, because if I’d had any family, other than the kids of course, I’d have made it my business to keep us all tight, a little ball of strength safe against whatever the outside world could hurl at us.

I’d looked Clio up on Facebook. With a name like hers she wasn’t hard to find. She hadn’t been lying about her house being big, either. It was some kind of stately home. It even had a Facebook page of its own and you could hire it out for weddings. There was a smaller wing on either end of the main house. I could picture Clio living in one of them and her brother in the other with their mother keeping the peace between them. From the pictures, it looked like these wings would dwarf my whole house. How the other half lived, eh?

There were plenty of pictures of Clio, too, with various blonde, expensive-looking friends on yachts and ski slopes and relaxing at extravagantly laid dining tables. I felt a bit bad spying on her like that, but I couldn’t stop looking. I clicked further and further back into Clio’s past until her timeline came to an end. There were no pictures of anyone who might be her family, no smiling faces around a Christmas tree or birthday celebrations, none of that, just a string of photos that she’d been tagged into by other people. It looked like Clio had no life of her own, just what she got from others.