“We told her-”

“A year. Every weekend for a year, I’ve been asking Holly what she did this week, and she’s been giving me a big steaming heap of crap.”

“We told her it would need to be a secret for a little while, because you’d had a fight with your family. That’s all. We were going to-”

“You can call it keeping secrets, you can call it lying, you can call it whatever the fuck you want. It’s what my family does best. It’s a natural-born, God-given talent. My plan was to keep Holly as far from it as possible and hope she would somehow beat the genetic odds and grow up into an honest, healthy, nontwisted human being. Does that sound excessive to you, Olivia? Does that really sound like too much to ask?”

“Frank, you’re going to wake her up again if-”

“Instead of which, you dumped her right smack into the middle of it. And hey presto, surprise surprise, the next thing you know, she’s acting exactly like a fucking Mackey. She’s taken to lying like a duck to water. And you’re egging her on every step of the way. That’s low, Liv. It really is. That’s just about the lowest, dirtiest, shittiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

She had at least the grace to redden. “We were going to tell you, Frank. We thought, once you saw how well it was working out-”

I laughed loud enough that Olivia flinched. “Suffering Jesus Christ, Liv! You call this working out? Correct me if I’m missing something here, but as far as I can see, this whole wretched cluster fuck is very, very far from working out.”

“For heaven’s sake, Frank, it’s not as if we knew that Kevin was going to-”

“You knew I didn’t want her anywhere near them. That should have been more than enough. What the hell else did you need to know?”

Olivia had her head down and a stubborn set to her chin that was exactly like Holly’s. I reached for the bottle again and caught the flash of her eyes, but she managed to say nothing, so I gave myself a great big refill, letting a good dollop slosh onto the lovely slate bar. “Or is that why you did it-because you knew I was dead set against it? Are you really that pissed off with me? Come on, Liv. I can take it. Let’s get it all out in the open. Did you enjoy making a fool of me? Did you get a good laugh out of it? Did you really throw Holly into the middle of a shower of raving lunatics just to spite me?”

That one snapped her back straight. “Don’t you dare. I would never do anything to hurt Holly, and you know that. Never.”

“Then why, Liv? Why? What on God’s green earth could have made this seem like a good idea?”

Olivia took a quick breath through her nose and got her control back; she’s had practice. She said coolly, “They’re her family too, Frank. She kept asking. Why she doesn’t have two grannies like all her friends, whether you and Jackie have any more brothers and sisters, why she couldn’t go see them-”

“Bullshit. I think she’s asked me about my side once, in her entire life.”

“Yes, and your reaction showed her not to ask you again. She asked me instead, Frank. She asked Jackie. She wanted to know.”

“Who gives a fuck what she wants? She’s nine years old. She also wants a lion cub and a diet made up of pizza and red M &Ms. Are you going to give her those too? We’re her parents, Liv. We’re supposed to give her what’s good for her, not whatever the hell she wants.”

“Frank, shhh. Why on earth should this have been bad for her? The only thing you’ve ever said about your family was that you didn’t want to get back in touch. It’s not as if you’d told me they were a shower of ax murderers. Jackie is lovely, she’s never been anything but good to Holly, and she said the rest of them were perfectly nice people-”

“And you took her word for it? Jackie lives in her happy place, Liv. She thinks Jeffrey Dahmer just needed to meet a nice girl. Since when does she make our child-rearing decisions?”

Liv started to say something, but I punched the words in harder till she gave up and shut her face. “I feel sick here, Liv, physically sick. This is the one place where I thought I could rely on you to back me up. You always thought my family wasn’t good enough for you. What the hell makes them good enough for Holly?”

Olivia finally lost the rag. “When did I ever say that, Frank? When?”

I stared. She was white with anger, hands pressed back against the door, breathing hard. “If you think your family isn’t good enough, if you’re ashamed of them, then that’s your problem, not mine. Don’t you put it on me. I never once said that. I never thought it. Never.”

She whipped around and grabbed the door open. It shut behind her with a click that, if it hadn’t been for Holly, would have been a house-shaking slam.

I sat there for a while, gawping at the door like a cretin and feeling my brain cells whiz-bang like dodgem cars. Then I picked up the wine bottle, found another glass and went after Olivia.

She was in the conservatory, on the wicker sofa, with her legs curled under her and her hands tucked deep into her sleeves. She didn’t look up, but when I held out a glass to her she disentangled a hand and took it. I poured us each a quantity of wine that could have drowned a small animal and sat down next to her.

It was still raining, patient relentless drops pattering off the glass, and a cold draft was filtering in at some crack and spreading like smoke through the room-I caught myself making a mental note, even after all this time, to find the crack and caulk it over. Olivia sipped her wine and I watched her reflection in the glass, shadowed eyes concentrating on something only she could see. After a while I asked, “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Her head didn’t turn. “About what?”

“All of it. But let’s start with why you never told me my family didn’t bother you.”

She shrugged. “You never seemed particularly anxious to discuss them. And I didn’t think it needed saying. Why would I have a problem with people I’ve never met?”

“Liv,” I said. “Do me a favor: don’t play dumb. I’m too tired for that. We’re in Desperate Housewives country, here-in a conservatory, for fuck’s sake. It’s far from conservatories I was reared. My family is more along the Angela’s Ashes lines. While your lot sit in the conservatory sipping Chianti, my lot are off in their tenement deciding which greyhound to blow the dole money on.”

That got the faintest twitch of her lips. “Frank, I knew you were working-class the first time you opened your mouth. You never made a secret of that. I still went out with you.”

“Yeah. Lady Chatterley likes her bit of rough.”

The bitter edge took us both by surprise. Olivia turned to look at me; in the faint light trickling through from the kitchen her face was long and sad and lovely, like something off a holy card. She said, “You never thought that.”

“No,” I acknowledged, after a moment. “Maybe not.”

“I wanted you. It was as simple as that.”

“It was simple as long as my family was out of the picture. You may have wanted me, but you never wanted my uncle Bertie who starts fart-volume competitions, or my great-aunt Concepta who will explain to you how she was sitting behind a black on the bus and you should have seen the lips on him, or my cousin Natalie who put her seven-year-old on the sun beds for First Communion. I can see how I, personally, wouldn’t give the neighbors full-on heart attacks, maybe just a few mild palpitations, but we both know how the rest of the clan would go down with Daddy’s golf cronies or Mummy’s brunch club. Instant YouTube classic.”

Olivia said, “I’m not going to pretend that’s not true. Or that it never occurred to me.” She was quiet for a while, turning her glass in her hands. “At first, yes, I thought the fact that you weren’t in touch with them probably made things easier. Not that they weren’t good enough; just… easier. But once Holly came along… She changed the way I thought about everything, Frank, everything. I wanted her to have them. They’re her family. That takes priority over their sun-bed habits.”