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gratitude for her presence. Kitty smiled vaguely, then flapped something at her. ‘We need to pay this quickly.’ She handed Isabel an overdue gas bill. ‘They’re threatening to cut us off. But it says at the bottom we can pay it by phone if you have a card.’
    The credit-card statement Isabel had just opened informed her that she had failed to make the minimum payment for the past two months, and had added what she considered a grotesque sum to the already oversized total owing. Isabel shoved it to the bottom of the pile. There was no money. Mr Cartwright had said so. ‘I’ll sort it out,’ she assured her daughter. She would pay the bills. Find the money. It would be all right. What am I supposed to do? she asked herself. If I do one thing, I may break their hearts. If I do the other, I’ll certainly break my own.
    ‘I don’t recognise this one.’ Kitty threw a thick white envelope at her, with pointed, elegant handwriting on the front.
    ‘Put those to one side, darling. Probably one of the French relations who’s just heard.’
    ‘No, it’s addressed to Dad. And it’s marked “personal”.’
    ‘Put it with those, then, the typed ones. Anything that needs urgent attention throw at me. Anything else, leave it for now. I don’t have the energy today.’ She was so tired. She seemed to be tired all the time. She imagined the relief of sinking into the sofa’s exhausted cushions and closing her eyes.
    ‘We will be all right, Mum, won’t we?’
    Isabel sprang upright. ‘Oh, we’ll be fine.’ She could sound convincing when she wanted to. She was forcing her facial muscles into an encouraging smile when she was arrested by the piece of paper in front of her, Laurent’s signature at the bottom. An image of him signing floated before her eyes, the dismissive inky flourish, the way that he rarely looked at the paper while he wrote. I will never see his hands again, she thought. Those squared fingers, the seashell-coloured nails. I will never feel them on me. Holding me. Nine months on, she knew these moments: loss hit her with no delicacy, no warning. There was nothing gentle about grief. It launched itself at you like a rogue wave on the seafront, flooding you, threatening to pull you under. How could those hands simply cease to exist?
    ‘Mum, you need to see this.’
    It took all her reserves of strength to focus on Kitty. Her head felt strange, as if she couldn’t work her face into anything resembling neutrality.
    ‘Just put any bills to one side, lovey.’ Laurent , she was screaming inside, how could you leave us? ‘I tell you what, why don’t we finish this tomorrow? I think . . . I need a glass of wine.’ She heard the tremor in her voice.
    ‘No. You’ve got to look at this.’ Kitty waved another letter in front of her.
    More official things to sign, decide. How am I meant to make this choice? Why do we have to sacrifice everything? ‘Not now, Kitty.’ With an effort she kept her voice under control.
    ‘But look. Here.’ The typewritten letter was thrust into her hands. ‘I don’t know if this is some kind of joke but it says someone’s left you a house.’
    ‘Isn’t all this . . . a bit dramatic?’
    Fionnuala was taking a break from rehearsals at the City Symphonia. They were sitting in the bistro where they had had hundreds of lunches, close enough to the auditorium to hear a double bass being tuned and retuned, a few experimental scales from an oboe. Alternately Isabel felt blissfully at home and an acute sense of loss, this time of her old life, her old self. A year ago I was an innocent, she thought, untouched by real pain. She was uncomfortably envious now of her friend, who was chatting away, unaware of the depth into which Isabel had sunk. It should be me sitting there, moaning about the conductor, with half my brain still stuck in the Adagio, she thought.
    ‘Don’t you think you’re in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater?’ Fionnuala sipped her