She was still quivering with irritation, her nails tapping an impatient rhythm on her watch face, just in case we didn’t realise her time was immensely more valuable than ours.

As the details of what Massimo had done emerged, Anna shrank into the armchair. I’d expected to feel a bit smug at finally having the upper hand, at watching her forced to absorb a few blows after all the times she’d fanned the flames of Massimo’s dissatisfaction with me, with Sandro.

But as she said, ‘Nico, my poor boy,’ I recognised her need to make things right for her sons. A primeval urge to protect, to defend, to repair. But I couldn’t see how she was going to fix things for both of them when the problem was each other.

‘Massimo? Is what Lara is saying true?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ But he sounded subdued, none of the usual condescending conviction in his words.

Maggie moved to speak, but I put up my hand to stop her. Standing up for myself might become a habit. ‘You don’t need the gory details, Anna, but it was like that.’

Suddenly though, I didn’t want to launch in with how he’d bullied me, how Sandro lived in fear of getting things wrong, how every time we thought we’d done what he wanted he’d up the stakes with another demand. Not for Massimo’s sake, but because I couldn’t face telling a mother what a total bastard her son had turned out to be. No one looked down at a tiny newborn face and thought, ‘I’m going to teach you to ride roughshod over everyone you meet.’

But while I was standing there, hesitating about pulling out the drawer of truths and releasing them to descend like vultures on the corpse of happy families, Maggie frowned at me. She looked almost apologetic, as though she was embarrassed to speak.

‘There’s something else I need to tell you, Lara.’ She glanced at Massimo.

‘Sandro’s got a half-brother.’

48

Maggie

Anna was the first to react. ‘Not Caitlin’s son?’ she asked, her eyes pleading for a negative answer.

‘No. Dawn’s.’

Lara let out an exclamation somewhere been a shout and a scream. ‘Dawn’s?’

She spun round to look at Massimo. ‘You told me she didn’t want any children, that she was too self-centred. Have you told the truth about anything? Did you know about him? How old is he?’

Her distress was so acute, so painful to watch, that I wished I’d never met Dawn, that we’d all staggered on in blissful ignorance. It was like seeing the last stitch attaching a button to a coat finally fray and give up the ghost.

I tried to calm her. ‘Lara. Lara. I’m sorry. I thought you should know.’

But she was beside herself. ‘Did you carry on seeing Dawn and Caitlin behind my back?’ Her voice kept petering out, then raging up again as more scenarios and betrayals presented themselves.

Massimo was doing his best to respond but his answers couldn’t break through the molten fury of Lara’s torrent of questions.

But it was Anna who took us all by surprise. She stepped towards Massimo, light as a bird skittering over the sand, and slapped him. The noise as her palm made contact with his cheek brought Lara’s explosion of questions and accusations to a halt.

It was so unexpected that I nearly giggled. Lara gasped. But most surprising of all was Massimo. He rubbed his cheek but didn’t utter a word of retaliation.

Anna, however, still had plenty to say. ‘I didn’t bring you up to lie and cheat!’

I did an internal nod at that. Anna could certainly lay claim to brutal honesty. Never knowingly sugarcoating anything in her life. If I’d been nasty and hard, this would have been my moment to sit back and enjoy the show – the self-important Italian mamma ripping into her arrogant son. Instead I felt sick at the family bloodbath. I’d be devastated if Sam ever hurt Francesca the way Massimo had shafted Nico and she wasn’t even my child.

Anna masked her anguish as fury but her words were raw, almost hissed, totally unlike her usual declarations delivered with cold indifference. This was a surge of emotion, erupting straight from the heart.

Reassuring to know she did have one, after all.

‘You betrayed your own brother. And you’ve deprived me of a grandson for – how long? – thirteen years? A boy of Farinelli blood, who doesn’t even know his own grandmother. Vergogna! You should be ashamed of yourself. Have I taught you nothing? Family is everything we have. Where’s your son now?’

Massimo shook his head and looked away. ‘I don’t know. I lost touch with them.’

Anna was becoming more Italian, more animated. She waved a hand at me. ‘You Maggie, how do you know about the boy? What’s his name?’

‘Ben.’

‘Beniamino. Good. An Italian name.’

From what Dawn had told me, I didn’t think honouring Ben’s Italian heritage was high on her list of priorities. She probably stopped eating spaghetti after her marriage to Massimo. But, as always, Anna would see the world through her own personal periscope.

I filled her in, watching her face fall with horror, and then, in true Farinelli fashion, a little lift of pride at the swimming champion bit.

‘I want to meet my grandson. I understand responsibility even if my son doesn’t. Maggie, can you find Dawn again?’

I glanced at Lara. She looked like she was watching a high-speed car race, where everything was whizzing past her in a blur and she was confused about who was in the lead. I hadn’t intended to become a people-tracing service, merely set the record straight so Lara could make the right decisions about her future.

I hesitated. ‘Maybe. I think Dawn said she lived in the north somewhere.’ The ‘north’ was a suitably large area. Hopefully, it would take Anna a while to pin him down to Newcastle. I was pretty sure tracking down a county swimming champion on Google wouldn’t be beyond me, especially if I enlisted Francesca’s help – she was probably already friends with him on Instagram. My brain ached at the thought of trying to fix another family disaster. I’d drop that one off the to-do list for the time being, given that I was supposed to be supporting Lara, not introducing more world-class athletes into the family for Sandro to be compared with. And God knows whether Lara would even want to meet Dawn – the wife who saved herself, leaving the frying pan sizzling and empty for Lara to jump into.

Thankfully at that moment Robert came pootling down the hallway trying to eat a banana. I was glad of an excuse to escape for a minute.

‘Robert, let me just peel that for you.’

‘Thank you. Who are you?’

‘I’m Maggie.’

‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Robert but you can call me Bob.’

Behind me, I heard Anna say, ‘Massimo, pack a case and get out. You can stay with me until we repair the damage you’ve caused.’

A long pause. ‘If we ever can.’

Then a sound I didn’t know Anna was capable of making.

A sob.

49

Two Years Later, MAGGIE

Anna took a seat on our terrace with its distant view of the sea. Just looking out over the water with the pier silhouetted against the sky made me feel as though I was living somewhere exotic. Anna had begged us not to move from Siena Avenue but Nico had been adamant. To her credit, she’d been very restrained when the ‘For Sale’ sign went up. Thankfully she took herself off to Italy for a holiday a few days before we left forever, sparing us the ordeal of seeing her distraught face bobbing out from behind the removals van. During the nine months we’d lived in Moneypenny Cottage, she’d even managed the odd compliment hidden under a criticism: ‘You wouldn’t think that a dark house like this would be so cosy.’

Instead she directed her venom towards Caitlin, or the person now known as ‘that first wife’ at every opportunity. When she saw Caitlin’s pastel jugs on a shelf in the hallway, she turned up her nose. ‘I don’t know why you’ve still got these. That woman had such insipid taste in everything. And they’re just dust traps anyway.’

I’d let Nico decide what to bring with us when we moved. Francesca just shrugged whenever Nico asked her if she wanted to keep various bowls, mirrors and all sorts of other old crap no one had ever needed in their lives. Unless you were a brushing-behind-the-radiators, grout-whitening, lavender-balls-in-your-bloomers type of person.

Today though, Anna was on her big-family-gathering best behaviour, snapping open her bag and handing out tubes of Baci chocolates to Francesca and Sam.

She hesitated, then passed me a little box, wrapped in the sort of paper that cost three quid a sheet. ‘Happy birthday, Maggie.’

Mum raised her eyebrows at me, Parker-speak for ‘That looks like it cost a bomb’.