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anyone ever did him wrong, it wouldn’t have been wise given the family he came from, and besides everyone was far too fond of him to want to hurt him in any way, or to cause any deliberate offence. It was simply that he was a lot of people’s first port of call when something needed doing, since he had a knack of sorting out problems and making things happen. He filled in complicated forms for the elderly and infirm, organised transport for their hospital visits, found plumbers for their leaks, made sure cars were properly fixed before bills were paid, dealt with snooty power companies, called in the Brightest Spark (his cousin Finn, the local electrician), or another cousin who was a nurse, or Carrie who worked for social services. He had a bigger network in and around Kesterly than British Telecom, his mother would often tease, and Jules was convinced that Aileen was right.
    Like Jules’s mother, Marsha, Aileen had lost her husband at a young age, and had had to bring up her child alone. However, with so many brothers and sisters all over the Temple Fields estate, as well as back home in Ireland, and all the nieces and nephews that entailed, plus further extended family and of course friends of family, it could hardly be said that Aileen had lacked support. In Marsha’s case the circumstances had been entirely different. Apart from her lovely next-door neighbours Trisha and Steve, parents to Jules’s lifelong best friend Em, she’d had no one to help with the burden – or share the joys – of being a single parent. Unless she counted her mother-in-law, Florence, but it was hard to do that when Florence had always seemed to resent every single finger she was forced to lift in assistance of others.
    ‘It’s a miracle your father turned out to be as kind and lovely as he was, having a mother like that,’ Marsha would often sigh when she and Jules were talking about Florence, ‘so let’s just be thankful he didn’t take after her.’
    Jules’s father had died when she was five years old. It was an accident that should never have happened, and wouldn’t have if he’d left work a minute earlier or later. In the event he was driving home when a tree fell on his car, crushing it.
    Whether it was the shock of fate changing her world so abruptly that had made Marsha so nervous of life, or whether she’d been like it before her husband was killed, Jules couldn’t be sure. She only knew that her mother, as sweet and funny and wise and supportive as she could often be, would leap out of her skin at the merest unexpected noise, constantly shy away from confrontations in case she ended up being punished in some ghastly cosmic way, and worried herself ragged from the minute Jules left the house until she came home again. It was a part of her mother’s character that Jules had always found wearing – and intensely annoying when she was in her teens – although it had made her extremely protective of her.
    Since Grandmother Florence had departed the world when Jules was eleven, it had been just Marsha and Jules, with Trish, Steve and Em providing all the family they needed. And when it became evident, a few years later, that Jules’s relationship with the dashingly lovely Kian Bright was turning serious, they were all more than happy to be a part of Kian’s chaotic family, in spite of them living on the wrong side of the estate. (This was something that had only ever mattered to Marsha and Trish, until they met Kian and Aileen whom it was impossible not to adore.)
    It hadn’t even seemed to bother Marsha too much that Kian had no plans to go to uni. He’d seemed quite chilled about continuing to divide his working hours between his cousin Danny’s boxing club on the edge of town, and the Red Lion, for as long as it floated his boat – a phrase that had tickled Marsha to bits when she’d first heard it. (She’d known in her heart that Kian was going to amount to something, everyone did, it was just going to take