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Lots of girls had wanted to be noticed by Adam Leblond.
    Frankie snorted. 'Being a "nice bloke" don't mean much.'
    She let her head rest against the window. 'Pity he's always been a good tenant, if only he'd been a bad one. Bad tenants only get notice of two weeks.'
    Molly swung around in her seat, aghast. 'But you wouldn't have wanted a bad tenant, Judith! Friends of ours let to students, and they treated the house like a squat. Disgusting, honestly.'
    Judith felt her shoulders move on a silent laugh, but didn't risk offending Molly by pointing out that her remark had been an attempt at grim humour. How had she ended up with such a sister? Now Molly was being all earnest about how Judith hadn't been there to take control if things had gone wrong, and that she, Molly, wouldn't have wanted to take it on, and Frankie was just too busy. Tom might've been persuaded, of course, if he'd been in a good mood, but it was a bit much to ask him now Judith and him weren't married...
    Frankie swerved into the middle lane to overtake - or should that be undertake? - on the wrong side, making Judith's head tap uncomfortably against the glass. She shifted her position.
    Molly grabbed the handle on the inside of the door as Frankie raced on to jink the car around a Land Rover. 'Of course, you're welcome to our spare room for as long as it takes.' She didn't sound exactly enthusiastic.
    Judith shut her eyes. Molly and Frankie's spare room. Oh God. She'd tried not to think about it until now. Leaving the Giorgio-pain behind had been her priority, that last sight of Giorgio, so distant.
    But now she considered Molly's spare room, a not-quite-a-double room with a single bed and a wardrobe full of old tennis rackets and one-man tents belonging to their son, Edward, remnants and reminders of his childhood that Molly refused to throw out. Edward was 33 now and lived in Scotland with a girl his parents scarcely knew. It was doubtful that he'd be off with the scouts any time soon.
    Their house was one Frankie had built himself in the mid-eighties, steeply gabled and the window frames stained forest green. It always looked to Judith like part of a Tesco supermarket. A good big property, roomy, and, technically, with four bedrooms.
    Of these, Molly and Frankie's enormous bedroom was the most impressive, an en suite bathroom plus a dressing room. The other big room, over the double garage, was used as an office, and permanently strewn with paper and drawings of extensions. And then there was 'Edward's room', which Molly kept as it had been when he left it to go to university in 1989, the bed covered with a marbled blue quilt and the grey carpet vacuumed every week. Judith would've liked to be offered Edward's room because it was pleasant and spacious and had a bathroom. But it seemed the modest spare room was as good an offer as she was going to get.
    Maybe she ought to book into a B&B. The prospect seemed suddenly attractive.
    Would Molly be offended - or relieved? She tried to envisage her life as a guest of her sister and brother-in-law. Was Molly still grumpy in the mornings? Would Frankie feel he couldn't relax and be himself with Judith there? Or, worse still, that he could? He might wear a gaping dressing gown and scratch sweaty bits of him.
     
    In the spare room, she discovered, against her expectations, Molly had emptied the wardrobe. The furniture smelled of Lemon Pledge and the fresh peach bed linen of fabric conditioner. By the time all Judith's bags were in the room - carried ultra-carefully up the stairs, for God's sake don't mark the new wallpaper - the floor area had shrunk dramatically. Hemmed in by her possessions she felt a massive heave of homesickness for her own place. The comfortable rooms of her flat on The Strand, the balcony scorched by the sun and overlooking the rippling blue of Sliema Creek and across to Valletta. The double bed in the shaded bedroom at the back.
    Bit late for that. Her flat had been abandoned along with the