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long. There are a million things I’d rather do on a Sunday night than hang out with your mother.’
    â€˜We’ll stay an hour, tops.’
    Liam gave her a disbelieving look and then threw all but one of the pillows on to the floor and lay down with his back to her. Within a couple of minutes Diana heard his steady breathing, which told her he was already asleep.
    Diana quietly finished getting ready for bed and then slipped between the sheets next to her husband, already dreading his reaction when he found out he would have to spend an evening with the priest. She debated waking him up to tell him so she could deal with his anger privately rather than in front of her mother and Father Keating, but she knew if she told him he would never agree to go.
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    â€˜Stop fidgeting,’ Liam said as he took one hand off the steering wheel to pull Diana’s ponytail from her grasp. ‘It drives me mad when you do that.’
    Before they were married, Liam had found it endearing the way Diana constantly fidgeted with things around her: how she tore paper napkins into confetti, or twisted the chain for the silver locket she always wore into a tight spiral when she was nervous, or, as she had just been doing, ran her hair between her fingers when she was deep in thought. But lately whenever he caught her fidgeting he just told her off.
    Liam pulled the car into the kerb out the front of Diana’s mother’s house, a two-storey structure with the imposing columns and elaborate entrance favoured by Italian families, while Diana rubbed her locket between her fingers without realising it. When she saw the reaction on Liam’s face she dropped her hands to her sides and clenched the fabric of her skirt to prevent her hands from betraying her again.
    â€˜Sorry,’ she muttered.
    She wanted to make a joke to lighten the mood, but from the scowl on Liam’s face she knew a joke wouldn’t be well received. His dark eyes, inherited from a distant Spanish ancestor, turned even darker when he was in a foul mood like this, which seemed to happen often lately, and his full eyebrows knotted together in a way that caused a deep line to appear in the middle of his forehead. Diana had told him many times that if he kept scowling he would end up with wrinkles well before his thirtieth birthday, but that tended to make his mood even worse.
    Eleanor lived alone in the house Diana and her brother, Tom, had grown up in. Since Diana’s father died from prostate cancer two years earlier, Diana and Tom had been trying to convince their mother to sell the house and move somewhere smaller and less expensive to maintain, but she said she wasn’t ready yet.
    â€˜Now, we’re not staying long, remember?’ Liam said to Diana as they walked down the concreted path towards her mother’s front door. ‘You know how she is. The longer we stay, the more upset she’ll get. Maybe we shouldn’t even tell her about the available embryo.’
    Diana rang the doorbell. ‘I’m not going to do this without telling my mother first. Be nice, okay? I promise we won’t stay long.’
    Eleanor greeted them so quickly it made Diana wonder if she had been standing by the door waiting for them. After plying them with hugs and kisses she stepped back to let them into the house. A vase filled with lavender, picked from a prolific bush in the front garden, filled the foyer with its heady scent.
    â€˜You both look wonderful,’ Eleanor said.
    â€˜Thanks, Mum, so do you,’ Diana said. She meant it, too. Even though her mother had turned fifty the month before, there was barely a line on her face to betray her age. Diana had inherited her mother’s olive skin and she hoped that meant she would look as young as her mother did when she was her age.
    Father Keating stood up from the couch as they entered the lounge room. He looked just the same as Diana