On Good Friday, when Massimo hopped out of bed at seven o’clock, kissing me on the cheek and saying, ‘You stay in bed, beautiful. I’m just off to collect your Easter present,’ I had to stop myself saying, ‘We could have been with Dad by eight-thirty.’ However, on the upside, I’d managed to sidestep torturing Sandro with a weekend at some of London’s most macabre attractions by reminding Massimo we needed to ‘rein in’ our spending.

I snuggled back down into my pillow, my mind churning around the contradictions of my husband. So many thoughtful gestures to balance his hurtful outbursts. But I’d known that from the beginning, when he’d first made a play for me at work. He’d brightened my day by noticing a new blouse. Then crushed my confidence by wrinkling his nose at my latest haircut. Brought me coffee when I worked through my lunch hour. Then driven off without me if I was five minutes late leaving the office. But whenever I was with him, I was part of the action, absorbing his energy – good or bad – rather than a passive bystander. And without the Farinellis, with all their collective faults, I’d now be alone in my world, except for my dad who was slowly losing the grip on his. I consoled myself that even if I’d rather have gone to visit Dad, Massimo making a special effort with an Easter present was another little crumb on the right side of the ‘He loves me, he loves me not’ scales.

But by ten o’clock, I was starting to wonder where Massimo had got to. Like my dad, I hated people being out in the car and taking longer than I expected. So my first reaction when Massimo came bursting through the door with a big ginger puppy in his arms was one of relief. Followed by bemusement, then fear.

Massimo’s face, that beautiful, haughty face, was alive with excitement. ‘Look what I found!’

I backed away, imagining he must have found the dog wandering outside and had brought in to stop it getting run over. I wished he’d tied it up outside.

He came right up to me with it struggling and flailing to get out of his arms. I stood on the second step of the stairs. He thrust the dog towards me, nearly making me scream.

‘A little something to make up for losing Misty. A Rhodesian Ridgeback. Last one in the litter. Nearly six months. They were going to breed from him but he turned out to have a kink in his tail so they wanted to find a new home for him. I persuaded them he’d have an amazing life with us.’

I tried to smile but I wanted to stampede up the stairs and lock myself in the bedroom until he’d shut the animal away. He couldn’t be serious. He knew I was terrified of dogs since I’d been bitten by a collie as a child, knew I’d stopped taking Sandro to the park because I couldn’t relax if there were any dogs running around. Even if they were on a lead, I couldn’t take my eyes off them in case they suddenly slipped their collar and attacked us.

To my horror, Massimo shouted up the stairs for Sandro, who shot out of his bedroom immediately, his expression a mixture of eagerness and trepidation.

‘Ta-da! Say hello to your new pet, Lupo. It means wolf in Italian.’

Sandro’s face dropped, then he glanced at me and wrenched his mouth into a smile. He hovered on the landing, while Massimo beckoned enthusiastically.

‘Look how cute he is. Man’s best friend. You’re going to love him, Sandro. Perhaps even more than Misty. Dogs are such good companions.’

Massimo’s excitement was clouding over as neither of us responded. I couldn’t let him down, couldn’t throw back in his face what he’d done to cheer us up. He’d probably thought I’d be okay with a dog of our own. And rationally, I knew most of them were fine. Plus we’d had lots of conversations about how I didn’t want Sandro to go through life freezing on the spot every time a dog was coming the other way. So I swallowed down my fear and walked over to Lupo, forcing myself to stroke its head.

‘He’s gorgeous, Sandro, look how friendly he is,’ I said, pressing myself against the hall wall as Lupo strained towards me, his big tongue flapping in my direction. I could feel the fear circulating at the back of my knees, making my legs tremble.

I summoned up the voice I’d heard dog owners using, with the little endearments that always ended in a ‘y’.

‘There’s a lovely doggy.’

‘These dogs are native to Africa, Sandro. I drove all the way to Whitstable to fetch him,’ Massimo said, impatience gathering in his voice.

But among all the other rubbish traits Sandro had inherited from me – an overlong second toe, a wonky canine tooth, a tendency to chapped lips – a paralysing fear of dogs was on the list. I couldn’t let Massimo notice Sandro was reversing up the stairs rather than motoring down. I clapped my hands with delight like a nursery teacher about to burst into a rendition of ‘Wheels on the Bus’.

‘Come on, let’s see if he likes our garden. He might want to do a wee if he’s had a long journey, and we don’t want him making a mess in the house.’ I beckoned him down the stairs.

Massimo put down the dog on the hallway floor, where it started to jump up and scrabble at my thighs. I wanted to burst into tears.

Massimo eyed me closely. ‘So what do you think of your present?’

I forced a big smile. ‘A complete surprise! I didn’t even know you wanted a dog.’

‘I bought it for Sandro. It will do him good. And he’ll be a brilliant guard dog for you when I’m away.’

It was a measure of how bonkers my life had become that I was prepared to put up with a dog that frightened me rather than risk my husband’s wrath at my ingratitude.

11

MAGGIE

Even if Francesca saw me only as a source of sanitary towels she didn’t have to ask her dad to buy, her attitude towards me had definitely softened during the last fortnight.

As a result, I dithered over broaching the attic clearing with her, torn between needing a proper workspace and the fear of smashing the delicate truce that had sprung from such an unlikely source. However, with the middle of April, my deadline for moving out of the shop, fast approaching, Nico was adamant. ‘You need a place to work and we need the house to be a home, not a shrine.’

Contrarily, as soon as he showed any signs of being able to sweep Caitlin into a corner, I took it not as a sign he loved me so deeply he was now able to move on, but as an indication that he didn’t let himself get too attached to anyone. I hoped if I dropped dead tomorrow, I wouldn’t be brushed out of his life into a few bin bags and a couple of wicker baskets and carted off to Oxfam.

I sat downstairs in the kitchen while Nico discussed it with Francesca, bracing myself for raised voices. But when Francesca came down, she leant shyly against the doorjamb.

‘When you’ve got your sewing room finished, I was wondering if you could make me a dress for the end of year party? If you want, that is.’

I wanted to leap off my chair and promise to make fifty-five dresses, each in a different colour. The opportunity to do something we could discuss together, that wasn’t Nico manufacturing a ‘And now you will get to know Maggie’ occasion, filled me with hope for the future that I couldn’t have predicted even two weeks ago.

When Saturday rolled around, Massimo and Sandro invited Sam to the park with them. He’d settled in very well to having an extended family. In fact, for two pins, he’d probably move into Massimo’s house, with the double lure of football and Lupo. I wasn’t sure how keen he’d be on living with Lara though. She was what my mum would call ‘dour’, endlessly looking like she was waiting for rain to come bucketing down despite a cloudless sky. Massimo seemed to adore her though, always putting his arm round her and saying, ‘I do love you’ if she even brought him a cup of tea.

As I watched Sandro scuffing along behind, trailing his hand along the top of walls, stopping to pick up a feather, I had a sneaking suspicion Massimo was enjoying having my football-mad Sam to indulge. Every time I saw them together, they were discussing players in the Premier League I’d never heard of. Nico wasn’t very blokey in that way, far more interested in Gardeners’ World than Sky Sports, so it was brilliant Massimo was genuinely interested, rather than just pretending like me. I tried not to think about how much Sam had missed out on by having Dean as a father who, apart from the occasional postcard, had never troubled us with his presence. To be fair though, Dean had never made any pretence about who he was: a jack of all trades, working on building sites just long enough to make enough money to take off to a straw hut on some exotic island for months at a time. He was always telling me, ‘Mags, you’re too serious. Live for today. As long as I’ve got a beer and a bit of sunshine, I’m king of the world.’ But it had still hurt when he’d walked out.

I consoled myself that although I’d picked a dud for his father, at least I’d found a great stepdad for Sam in the end.