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with us is working well…if I ever get offered anything, that is.’
    ‘Will you sleep here tonight, Dee?’ Fleur asked.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. Quite often she slept at her parents’ home, a modest place that was a relatively short distance away on the edge of a less affluent area.
    In the bedroom that was hers in this house, she locked the door, a habit that she had acquired ever since the unwanted encounter with a semi-drunk Jerry when she had first come to the house, when he had entered herroom one night and tried to force himself on her. Then and there she had almost left, almost thrown her few belongings into her suitcase and rushed out. Only the images of the two young, unhappy faces had prevented her.
    Using her mobile phone, she called Fiona McGregor, having decided not to wait until the morning. A sense of urgency made her edgy. ‘Hello, Mrs McGregor. This is Deirdre.’
    ‘Oh, hello, Deirdre, my dear. How are you? Now, you are supposed to call me Fiona.’ The good-natured voice came back. Granny McGregor could be tart when annoyed, but never mean or unfair.
    ‘I know,’ Deirdre said, smiling, not wanting to tell her employer that she always thought of her as ‘Granny McGregor’. ‘I’m calling to ask if I could possibly come to see you tomorrow, Fiona. I’ve been thinking of going back to nursing, and I want to work out with you how I might do that and continue to look after the children.’
    ‘Well, my dear, I’m not really surprised. I’ve seen this coming on for some time, but I didn’t want to say anything until you had worked it out in your own mind. It seems youhave done so now. I just hope that you won’t leave us, because the children love you so and would be lost without you. So would I.’
    For the second time that evening, the relief of having unburdened herself to someone who could understand was overwhelming. It began to seem very odd to Deirdre now that she had not sought out this help before. Somehow she had got it into her head that she had to do it all herself. Fiona, she knew, was still mourning for her daughter. Meeting Shay had had something to do with this surge of courage as well.
    ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have waited to say something,’ Fiona was going on. ‘I think you’re upset. Am I right?’
    ‘Yes,’ Deirdre said, her voice low.
    ‘I suspect that you’ve had just about as much of Jerry Parks as you can stand. Right?’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Well, we’ll do something about it. Come tomorrow, at any time that’s convenient to you, dear,’ Fiona said. ‘There are one or two things I want to clear up with you as well, things that perhaps I should have told you before, but which I wanted to leave untilwe had all tested you out, myself and the children, then they got put off indefinitely. You’ve been a wonderful mother to the children, you’ve brought some sanity and stability to their lives. If my daughter were alive, she’d be the first to say that, so I want to thank you, Deirdre.’
    Deirdre wanted to cry. By a supreme effort she found her voice. ‘I’ll come at eleven o’clock, if that’s all right?’ she said.
    ‘That’s perfect. I’ll give you something to think about before you come. You’ll remember that I told you my daughter had won some money in a lottery, just before she got sick? The irony of it! Well, it’s much more than I gave you to believe. She got sixteen million dollars. That’s why friend Jerry is hanging around. He would have been up and out long ago, believe me. The last thing he wanted was to look after children that were not even his own, although I suspect that he would be the same with his own children.’
    ‘That makes it clearer,’ Deirdre said. ‘I understand more now.’ It had long been a mystery to her why Jerry, impatient and ill at easewith the children, should make a pretence of being there for them.
    ‘There’s a court case on to prevent him getting his hands on the money, because Moira had filed for divorce from