If you weren’t always so bloody helpless.

“Yes, I know. This is terrible.”

“Yes.”

“Charlie was talking the other night about his sister. He said she’s been seeing—no, he said she’s involved with a married man. That doesn’t sound like a one-off.”

“Maybe it’s another married man. Maybe she makes a habit of it.”

“She called him Danny.” Gemma shuddered.

Lyn picked up her container of paper clips and rattled it, hard. “Why would he tell Cat about Angela in the first place if he was going to keep seeing her?”

“I don’t know.”

“I could kill him.”

“I know. When I saw him coming out of the kitchen then, I thought, I could punch you, I could close my fist and punch you properly.”

Lyn looked down at her in-tray. There was a yellow Post-it note with a frantic message from her marketing coordinator—Lyn! Problem! Please look at before Christmas! She hadn’t even seen it until now. Her stomach clenched instinctively.

“Lyn?” Gemma looked up at her trustingly and swiveled her chair back and forth. “What will we do? Do we tell her?”

Lyn twisted her head from side to side. I am suffering from stress, she thought. I am suffering from profound stress.

The thought made her feel better for some reason.

“What do you think we should do?”

Delegate, Michael was always saying. You’ve got to learn to delegate.

“I don’t know.”

This was why delegating didn’t work.

Lyn said, “I think we should worry about it after Christmas. You can find out more from Charlie.”

“O.K.”

“What’s going on in here?” Cat came into the study, flinging back the door and coming to lean against the desk next to Lyn. She took the jar of paper clips out of Lyn’s hand and rattled it aggressively. The strands of hair around her face were damp. She must have washed her face, scrubbing away all the radiant happiness of that morning. The skin under her eyes looked sad and raw.

“Are you O.K.?” asked Gemma.

“Yes.” Cat took a paper clip and bent and straightened it between her fingers. She didn’t look at Gemma. “You’ll just have to break up with him.”

“Sorry?” Gemma stood up from her chair.

“You’ll break up with him sooner or later anyway.”

“But I like him. I really sort of like him.”

“He’s a locksmith, Gemma.”

“So?”

“So, for some reason you get off on sleeping with, I don’t know—blokes. But it’s not like you’re going to marry one of them.”

“Oh my God,” said Gemma. “I can’t believe you said that. That’s so snobbish! You sound like…you sound like Mum!”

The ultimate insult.

“I’m not saying you’re better than them, I’m saying you’re smarter than them.”

“Cat.” Now Lyn could feel stress, like a toxic chemical, flooding her bloodstream. “You can’t expect her—”

“She’ll find somebody else in five minutes. Somebody better. He’s too short for her. He’s not good enough for her. Besides which, she only met him because of Dan.”

“Yes, but—”

“I want to forget about it. I want to forget about that girl. How can I forget about it when Gemma’s dating her brother? The whole thing’s a joke.”

On the word “joke,” there was a break in Cat’s voice.

A tiny fracture of grief.

For a moment there was silence in the room.

“I’ll think about it,” said Gemma.

Lyn put her knuckle to her mouth and breathed in deeply. “But, Gemma—”

“I said I’ll think about it.” Gemma pushed her chair back in toward the desk. “She’s right. We would have broken up eventually anyway. I’m going to take Maddie for a swim.”

She left the room.

“It’s too much to ask,” said Lyn. “What if he’s the one?”

Cat flicked the mangled paper clip across the room. “I can assure you, there is no such thing.”

CHAPTER 11

I’ve ruined Cat’s Christmas, thought Gemma, changing into her swimsuit in Michael and Lyn’s bathroom. I am a bitch, a witch, a klutzy butterfingers.

“The problem with you, Gemma,” Marcus used to say, “is you don’t concentrate.”

She pulled up the straps of her swimmers and looked in Lyn’s cupboard for sunscreen. The house was becoming hotter and hotter. Nana, to Maxine’s disgust, had stripped down to her petticoat. Gemma’s own face in Lyn’s bathroom mirror was bright pink. She still had the piece of tinsel tied lopsided around her head, giving her a dopey, hopeful look.

Charlie, she realized now, had talked about his sister Angela, but she hadn’t even mentally noted that the names were the same. They didn’t feel the same. There was Angela, Charlie’s younger sister, whom he obviously adored. Then, there was Angela, evil husband stealer.

The right thing to do was to break up with him.

It would be a noble gesture of triplet solidarity.

It would be a sisterly sacrifice.

It would be like going on a hunger strike.

“Charlie, ask your sister why I can’t see you anymore. Ask her why she doesn’t look for wedding rings before she starts flirting and breaking my sister’s heart.”

Ah, but Charlie.

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.

The night before they’d had their own special Christmas Eve dinner on Charlie’s balcony. They cooked it together. “You’ve just got this mental block about cooking,” said Charlie. “Anybody can cook.” And it turned out when she was a little bit drunk and there was a good CD playing, so she was sort of dancing while she was cooking, with a wineglass in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, well, she was in fact a spectacular cook! It was a wonderful discovery.

He gave her perfume and a book for Christmas.

The Kettle girls were allergic to perfume, but she bravely dabbed it on her wrist and only sneezed eleven times in a row, spluttering in between each sneeze things like, “Hay fev-er!” “Gosh!” “Must!” “Be!” “Pollen!” “In!” “The!” “Air!”