The Italian Escape

by Catherine Mangan

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

S parkling sea, sun, delicious food and Aperol Spritz - escape to Italy with the perfect summer romance . . . Niamh Kelly's life hasn't turned out quite as she'd expected. She's thirty-three, still living at home and was recently dumped . . . by her boss. So when her sister invites her to tag along on a work trip to the sun-drenched Italian coast, Niamh jumps at the chance, eager to escape into a world of sparkling prosecco, delicious food, and breath-taking beaches. Upon her arrival, Niamh immediately falls in love with the beautiful Italian town they're staying in and realises she never wants to leave, deciding instead to stay and open up a quaint coffee shop nestled in charming old town streets - even if she has no idea what she's doing. But when a family tragedy and a tricky tourist season threaten her new business, Niamh isn't so sure she can stick it out. With help from her new-found Italian friends - and the possibility of romance on the horizon - can she make her new life in the sun a success? A glorious and uplifting escapist novel set against the stunning backdrop of the Italian coast. The perfect holiday read for fans of Rosanna Ley, Rachel Hore and Karen Swan Early readers LOVE The Italian Escape : 'This book is the perfect escape. Curl up and enjoy' ' Beautifully written. . . I just wanted the experience to go on for longer' 'I really enjoyed this book . . . recommended holiday reading '

Release date: April 29, 2021

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

There are ten thousand and eighty minutes in a week. That is exactly how long Niamh Kelly has been feeling depressed. Well, not in the true clinical definition of the word, obviously, but at the moment anything else felt like a massive understatement.

Her iPhone vibrated on the kitchen table in front of her – more concerned friends checking in, no doubt – but she couldn’t muster the energy to respond. She was tired of talking about it. She slumped back into the chair, tied her long, dark hair up into a knot, flicked the phone to silent and opened her thesaurus app. Surely there was a more appropriate word to describe her current state beyond just sad. But not even the app could offer much in the way of useful alternatives, proffering options such as ‘Bereaved’ (no one had died so that was totally useless), ‘Forlorn’ (sounded like someone from medieval England) and ‘Lugubrious’ (that sounded promising but she had no idea what it actually meant).

‘How are you feeling today, Niamh?’ she asked herself.

‘Lugubrious,’ she replied with an exaggerated sigh.

‘Are you talking to me, love?’ her mother asked from across the room.

‘No, just talking to myself, Mam.’

‘Oh, right,’ her mother replied over the sound of the television.

‘Lugubrious,’ she whispered to herself, tapping the screen on her phone. The definition read ‘mournful or gloomy’. Definitely accurate, she decided, but none of her friends would know what it meant, either, so she wouldn’t be able to use it without sounding pretentious, so rather disappointingly it was another useless option.

She had gone to the trouble of calculating the number of minutes: twenty-four hours, times sixty minutes, times seven days. She couldn’t do that kind of calculation in her head. Mathematics had never really been a strong point, not that she’d ever really cared enough to try. She’d never understood how Pythagoras’ theorem would benefit any aspect of real life, or why anyone was forced to learn long division when calculators had already been invented. It all seemed like a massive waste of time when there were so many more interesting things to be learned. So tonight Niamh felt entirely justified that in just a few seconds her calculator app could tell her the exact number of minutes that she had been in this sad mental state, without the need to rely on mental mathematical gymnastics.

‘Ten thousand and eighty-one now,’ she sighed under her breath as she spun the iPhone on the kitchen table and topped up her glass of wine.

‘What’s that, love?’ asked her mother from across the room, her eyes glued to the television screen.

‘Nothing. Just talking to myself,’ she mumbled.

‘Nina, why don’t you come over here and sit by the fire?’ her mother asked, patting the sofa alongside her.

‘No, I think I’ll go to bed,’ she muttered, examining a cluster of split ends in her hair.

‘Bed? It’s only nine o’clock. It’s still bright out. It’s a beautiful summer’s evening,’ her mother argued, tearing her eyes from the television programme. ‘Will you, for God’s sake, stop picking at your hair? Do you have lice or something?’ She stood up slowly, rubbing her knee, and crossed the living room towards her daughter.

‘What?’ Niamh asked through the bottom of her wine glass.

‘Why are you picking at your hair? There’s an epidemic going around you know – of lice. And they can hop from one head to another so it’s easy to get them.’

‘Jesus, Mam, no, I don’t have lice. I’m not dirty. It’s just split ends,’ Niamh cried, pulling on some strands of hair that had come loose.

‘They like clean hair, actually.’

‘What? Who likes clean hair?’ Niamh asked, now utterly frustrated with the conversation.

‘The lice do. They like clean hair. That’s why they hop from one head to another,’ her mother declared confidently, as if she had just eked out this nugget of medical certainty from the gospel that is the Reader’s Digest. All of her facts and strong opinions originated from the Reader’s Digest. Someone had once told her that if she subscribed to Reader’s Digest she would be able to have a conversation about anything because it taught you a little about everything. Mrs Kelly had been a regular subscriber for eight years now and quite fancied herself as a great conversationalist. ‘Anyway, it looks like you have lice or something when you pick at it like that. You don’t want people talking about you, do you?’

‘They already are, Mam,’ Niamh sighed. ‘I’ve provided plenty of fodder for the neighbours lately. No shortage of gossip this week. Niamh Kelly, thirty-three years old, newly single, no, wait … dumped, in fact, and jobless. No man. No job. What a disaster.’ Her voice was rising now. Her father lowered his newspaper a couple of inches. His glasses peered over the top momentarily, gauging the situation as he glanced from wife to daughter, but he quickly retreated back behind the temporary invisibility that the newspaper afforded him.

‘You do have a job. There’s nothing at all wrong with that job, Nina, and as soon as you’re feeling better you’ll go back to it. There’s no harm in taking a week off. You were due a break anyway.’

‘I’m not going back to it. I can’t go back! How can I go back there?’ She knew she was starting to sound hysterical now but she couldn’t stop it. ‘How can I go back and face him every day? I’d be the laughing stock of the place.’

‘I’m sure there is a way to avoid him, love. You shouldn’t have to give up your job just because you broke up. That’s not right.’

‘A, there is no way to avoid him, Mam. PlatesPlease is a startup – actually, even worse, it’s his startup, so there’s no avoiding him. And B, we didn’t break up. I was dumped. Remember? Dumped, dropped and discarded, like it all meant nothing. Like the past four years meant nothing. What a dope. How could I not have known? You know everyone will say that I must have guessed something, known something … How could I not have known?’

‘But you didn’t know and that’s not your fault. Sometimes things just don’t work out. People change. You don’t know what was going through his head, but if he could treat you like that then you’re better off without him,’ Una Kelly said, emphasising her words by jabbing her index finger on the table.

‘I’m nearly halfway through my thirties, newly single and no job. How did I end up here? Seriously, how is this my life?’ Niamh asked, shaking her head. She poured the remainder of the bottle into her glass and watched as it reluctantly released its last few drops.

The theme tune to the Friday-night chat show – a Friday-night ritual in every Irish household – hummed along on the television, signalling the end of any other possible conversation and the urgent need to make tea. Parents and ‘young marrieds with children’ around the country were gathering in front of the television and the fire, settling in for the next two hours, happy to be entertained. It would be the usual rollout of minor celebrities promoting their new movie, losers who had found God, turned their life around and had now written a book to help all the other losers out there do the same, and some twenty-something-year-old who had rejected meat and dairy and embraced veganism the previous year, had started making granola in their kitchen and had just sold the company to Kellogg’s for several million. At the end of the two hours, one half of the country would be motivated to fix or change their life and the other half would be depressed because their lives were just ordinary by comparison.

‘Is the kettle on?’ Niamh’s dad asked from behind the paper. He wouldn’t put it down until the programme started and it was safe to come out from behind it.

‘I’m putting it on now,’ replied her mother, opening a packet of biscuits. ‘Will you have a cup?’

‘I will so.’

Niamh smiled despite herself at the nightly exchange about the cup of tea that they drank religiously, and the easy way that her parents had with each other. She wondered then if relationships got easier with time and if, after so many years, you could just anticipate the other person so that there was never any need for angst or arguments. Did you just know the other person so well that you knew instinctively what they would or wouldn’t like, what they would or wouldn’t do, and so navigate conversations and situations easily, armed in advance with that knowledge?

‘Night,’ she said quietly, getting up from the table.

‘Night, love,’ they both replied at the same time, heads already directed towards the television.

‘Have a good sleep,’ her dad offered as he folded down the newspaper and stood to throw a log on the fire.

She picked up her phone and it flashed 21.10. This time last week she had been having dinner with Rick at the new tapas restaurant. Rick preferred to eat early in the evening so they always made an early dinner reservation.

‘It’s better for the digestion to eat early,’ he would say whenever she questioned the need to race to a restaurant by seven o’clock. ‘Plus, some places have an early-bird special before seven, so it’s an added bonus. See, Niamh, there is value for money everywhere if you look for it,’ he would recite smugly.

She was probably having dessert right around now, this time last week, in her new navy dress. Now that she thought of it, this exact time last week she was less than twenty minutes from being unceremoniously dumped and she was happily tucking into her tiramisu.

She hadn’t noticed anything unusual about his behaviour. He had been distracted over dinner, but not more than usual. He was in the middle of raising another round of funding for the business. He was always stressed when he was fundraising, so she had assumed it was purely work related.

‘Why do you think they have tiramisu on the menu if this is a tapas place?’ she had asked.

‘What?’ he had asked, scrolling through emails on his phone.

‘Tiramisu is Italian. Why does a Spanish tapas restaurant have tiramisu on the menu?’

‘Niamh, I have no idea. Maybe the Spanish don’t have that many desserts. Do you have any idea how many calories are in that thing?’ he retorted. ‘There are over six hundred calories in one slice of tiramisu, Niamh. That means you’d have to run for an hour and fifteen minutes just to burn that off,’ he snapped as he stuck his phone back in his pocket.

‘So I’ll walk to work every morning next week.’ She shrugged, and scraped the bowl.

‘Niamh, I don’t have time for this now. I have to work tomorrow.’

‘But tomorrow is Saturday!’ she whined.

‘Entrepreneurs are always on, Niamh, you should know that by now. It’s intense. We can’t all saunter into the office five days a week at nine o’clock like you do.’

Niamh leaned heavily on the edge of the sink now, shaking her head. She sighed to herself, thinking back on the series of events last Friday night. She should have seen it coming, but she hadn’t. Or maybe she had just refused to accept that there had been more arguments than smiles over the past few months.

She rinsed her glass in the sink and snuck two of her dad’s night-time cold and flu tablets from the medicine basket over the sink, swallowing them with lukewarm water from the tap. Apparently they weren’t addictive and they definitely helped knock you out at night.

She shuffled towards the kitchen door, thinking that she would have to burn that navy dress, but she couldn’t burn it right now, even though the fire was perfect. It was roaring up the chimney, resembling a miniature towering inferno in the grate. But if she came back downstairs with the navy dress and tossed it into the fire, it might be too much for her dad. He would either abandon his current position on the armchair and flee from the room, not wanting any part of the madness (missing his show in the process – and she’d hear about that until next Friday’s episode), or he’d think she had lost her mind and would start to worry about her.

She didn’t need anyone else to worry about her. She certainly didn’t need to have her dad offer any critical life advice. It was enough to deal with her mother and her Reader’s Digest nuggets of wisdom. One thing was sure, however – she would never wear that navy dress again. It would always be the dress she got dumped in. Shame, really, because she thought she looked kind of skinny in it. Well, not skinny exactly, but slim, or at least slimmer than she looked in real life. Kind of like a sartorial magic wand.

‘Waste of sixty euros,’ she sighed, heading towards the stairs.

She could hear the high-pitched whine of the vacuum cleaner downstairs. The postman dropped some envelopes through the door and the dog went nuts.

‘Mother of God, it’s eight o’clock on a Saturday morning,’ she groaned from under her duvet. She wasn’t hungover, exactly, but her head ached behind her eyes and her tongue felt like chalk.

What was it about small dogs that they always had to start a fight? It was like they were always on the defensive because of their size. Niamh had refused to walk Marty any more because he was completely out of control. He was a small, hairy little thing, a cross between a wheaten terrier and something else – no one knew exactly what. Her dad had taken him in when the neighbour’s dog got knocked up for the second time in a year and had another three puppies. They were all headed for the local shelter but everyone knew that the shelter had a seven-day kill policy, so the Kelly family had come to the rescue. Her mother had refused at first to have anything to do with it.

‘If you bring him in here, Paddy, you’ll have to take care of him.’

‘Ah, would you look at him. Sure he’s a lovely little thing,’ her father replied, scratching his chin. ‘He’ll be no bother at all.’

After a few disastrous attempts to walk him, Niamh refused point blank to take him out again. ‘He’ll just have to get his exercise in the back garden,’ she announced, coming in through the front door and opening the back one. ‘It’s mortifying to try to walk him. Honest to God, if there is a German shepherd in sight he’s heaving and straining at the leash, frothing at the mouth, trying to attack him, and he wouldn’t even reach the German shepherd’s knees. I think he has a Napoleonic complex or something. He definitely has issues of some sort.’ From then on Marty was sent out into the back garden to run around and get a bit of exercise.

‘Get out, Marty,’ she heard her mother roar over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. ‘Niamh, are you up?’ she shouted up the stairs. Her mother only ever called her by her proper first name when she was admonishing her.

‘No! Can you turn off the hoover, Mam? It’s only eight o’clock in the morning! That noise is torture at this hour!’ Niamh roared, despite her headache. She heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Clearly she wasn’t about to win this one.

‘The day is half over at eight o’clock in the morning,’ her mother said, throwing open the bedroom door. ‘Look at the state of this place, and it smells like a brewery. The window cleaners will be here in an hour so you better get up and get dressed.’

‘My curtains are closed, Mam! And they’ll only be washing the outside of the windows,’ Niamh argued, rubbing her temples.

‘It’s not right having those men outside your window and you inside in bed. Sure they’ll know full well that you’re inside in it if you have the curtains closed.’

‘Jesus,’ Niamh mumbled into the duvet. ‘All right, I’m getting up.’

‘Stop swearing, Niamh. And your sister Grace will be here any minute to drop off the boys for a few hours while she gets her hair done.’

Niamh didn’t know why her mother always referred to her as ‘your sister Grace’, but she did. It was never just ‘Grace’. It’s not like she had another one and might get them confused.

‘All right, I’m up, I’m up.’

She’d need something to dim the headache before the boys arrived. The sound level went up tenfold when Blake and Ben landed. Blake was a year older than his brother, but Ben was the mad one. No shortage of personality there. Niamh always felt that Grace should have swapped their names once she discovered their personalities, as Blake was way too weird a name to give any Irish boy. He’d definitely get beaten up over that in the future. Ben could have handled it as he was a bully already at only two years of age, but Blake was a quieter, more sensitive little thing. He was still terribly loud, but sweet and gentle. She’d have switched the names before anyone got too used to them.

‘Do we have any more of those dissolvable things in the red box?’ she asked as she padded slowly down the stairs in her pyjamas.

‘Did you drink too much wine again last night?’ her mother asked with a disapproving tut.

‘No, I think I’m getting a sore throat,’ Niamh lied. That was the only way to extract any sympathy, as hangovers were not tolerated. In fact, between herself and Grace, she was pretty sure that they had each only once ever made the rookie mistake of admitting to a hangover. Every other occasion for painkillers was the certain onslaught of strep throat, migraine or the flu. That way you stood a chance of getting tea and a blanket.

‘You should go to the doctor and get yourself checked out. You’re getting a lot of sore throats lately. Now go up and fix yourself, will you? Look at the state of you. They’ll be here soon. Oh, and dress the bed so the window washers don’t think we’re a bunch of tinkers.’

Now that Niamh thought of it, she probably hadn’t washed her hair since last Friday. The Friday that she wore the new navy dress and went to the new tapas restaurant. The Friday she was dumped. She hadn’t seen a mirror yet today, but she knew that her hair would be standing up in clumps from its unwashed roots. She might have hidden it under a baseball cap for the day to avoid the chore of washing and drying it, but she knew her sister would waft in wearing something expensive and looking like she’d just stepped out of a salon, even before she’d had her hair done. She always smelled expensive, too. Niamh had tried her perfume once to see if she could smell expensive as well, but it just smelled like bottled, overripe fruit on her skin.

Her sister was the successful one. She had a shining career as an architect, two perfect, if loud and berserk, toddlers and a doting husband. He was starting to lose his hair early, which Niamh was certain freaked her sister out. She wouldn’t be surprised if Robert showed up with hair implants one day to maintain the outward veneer of perfection, because who wants to show off their balding husband? Otherwise he was fine, though, and they seemed happy together.

She was tall, too, in the way that successful people are. Niamh had read once (in one of her mother’s Reader’s Digests, of course) that successful people are, for the most part, tall. Someone did a study of the most successful men and women in the USA and something like less than 1 per cent of them were short. That particular week had been especially tough at work, so the article had made her feel better about herself. Good to know that she could now righteously blame her five foot, four inch height for her professional shortcomings. In fact, she felt sure that the term ‘professional shortcomings’ was most likely coined by a successful, clever, tall person for short people everywhere.

She heard them before she saw them. The front gate was flung open with a clatter and both sets of little feet thundered down the gravel path. It always amazed her how much noise such small people could make. They were babbling in through the letterbox before anyone could even get to the front door. It was nine o’clock exactly. That was another difference between Niamh and her sister – Grace was always on time for everything. Niamh pulled open the kitchen door and scooped them up, one in each arm.

‘You two monsters are getting heavy!’

Blake called her ‘Nee’ but Ben hadn’t quite worked out his words yet so he just roared random sounds at people. Apart from ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’, the only name he’d got a handle on was ‘Granda’, which came out like ‘Gah’. It drove her mother mad, of course, that he could say ‘Granda’ but not ‘Nana’, so every visit was like a warped speech therapy session, with Nana repeating her name slowly in Ben’s face any time he would stand still.

When he wasn’t eating, he preferred to stomp on things and kill anything smaller than him, like random spiders or any sort of bug that had the misfortune to move in the back garden. He was the sort of silent but deadly type. Not even Marty was safe, and he knew it, retreating with a kind of terrorised screech whenever he saw Ben coming.

Grace was putting the kettle on in the kitchen. ‘I brought croissants from the French place you like, Niamh,’ she said giving her a hug.

‘Sympathy croissants?’ Niamh asked with a grimace. She was pretty sure that Grace hadn’t allowed a croissant to pass her lips in over ten years. ‘So is this tea and sympathy with a pity croissant thrown in for good measure?’

‘It can be if you like, but they’re bloody good croissants.’ To Niamh’s surprise, Grace pulled off a corner and stuffed it in her mouth. ‘So, what kind of mental state are we in, here? What stage in the grieving process – depressed and dejected, mad as hell, or sad and mopey?’

‘Definitely sad and mopey.’

‘So, what happened exactly? Did you do something to piss him off or is he just having an early mid-life crisis?’ Grace asked, pouring three mugs of tea.

‘I didn’t do anything!’ Niamh insisted. ‘We went out to dinner like I told you and when we got home he just said something like he didn’t “want to do this any more”.’

‘What exactly did he say, Niamh?’

‘He said, “Niamh, I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s not working. We’re going nowhere. There’s no point.”’

‘Sounds like a mid-life crisis to me. He’s a knob, Niamh. You’re better off without him.’

‘That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who’s turning thirty-four next birthday and newly single.’

Grace leaned against the kitchen table. ‘Are you telling me that you’d rather be in an average relationship than be single? Will you listen to yourself for a minute? That’s an absolute travesty! Women burned their bras for freedom in the sixties and there you are wishing you could hitch your wagon to some aspiring entrepreneurial loser.’

Mrs Kelly paused her attempt to scrub last night’s casserole dish. ‘No one burned any bras in the sixties. That’s a myth.’

‘Mam, everyone knows that feminists burned their bras in the sixties. That’s known all over the world,’ Grace countered confidently.

‘Well, anyone who thinks that is wrong. It’s a myth. The demonstration that created that myth was the 1968 protest of the Miss America contest when loads of women threw bras, stockings, girdles – all sorts of underwear – into a rubbish bin, but it was never set alight. Psychologists call it the Rashomon effect, where different people have contradictory accounts of the same incident.’ She rattled this off with gusto and resumed her scrubbing.

‘Reader’s Digest, Grace,’ sighed Niamh. ‘I’d just take that one at face value and leave it at that if I were you, or we’ll be here all day.’

Grace rolled her eyes. ‘So when are you going back to work? You can’t loll around here for ever or you’ll go out of your mind.’

‘I’m not going back to that place. I can’t!’ Niamh whined.

‘What? That’s ridiculous! That’s a fine job and you were good at it. Of course you’re going back.’

‘I can’t. I’ll be such a pity party. I’m mortified. Thirty-three years old and rejected by the man I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. God, what a mess.’ Niamh put her hands over her eyes. ‘Anyway, it’s his company, Grace, so it’s not like he’s going anywhere. I should never have gotten involved in it. I can’t believe I let him talk me into it. “Help me get started, Niamh … Let’s build this together, Niamh … ” I gave up that great job at that restaurant PR firm for the chance to work at a startup. I thought I’d be at the forefront of everything, pitching to the media and arranging press evenings. Then off Rick goes, raising money and doing media interviews, while I’m left running payroll. Wanker.’

‘Language, Niamh!’ Mrs Kelly said into the sink.

‘Well, he is, Mam, to be fair,’ offered Grace in support. ‘Look, you’re not actually losing your job; you are choosing not to go back to work. That’s different. That’s quitting. Or you could just pull yourself together and go back to work – how about that? You don’t have to lose your job over this. It’s not like you see much of him these days at work, or he’s directly in charge of you or anything. Don’t let him win. Fuck him. Just go back to work with your head held high.’

‘Language, Grace!’

Grace rolled her perfectly made-up eyes. ‘Or get another job.’

Marty let out a howl from under the table.

‘Ben! Get off of him!’ Grace shouted under the table. ‘Off!’ Ben was sitting on Marty who was, at this stage, flattened to the floor.

‘Ugh. Get another job?’ Niamh dropped her head into her hands. ‘What do I tell them at the interview? Oh yeah, my boyfriend dumped me, and I worked for him for the past four years, helping him build his startup, so I’ve gained no real experience apart from buying birthday cards, processing invoices, trying not to die of boredom overseeing payroll, and making sure the company cactus doesn’t shrivel up and die. Did you know it’s almost impossible to kill a cactus? It’s that sort of killer knowledge which makes me employee of the year material. They’ll be lining up around the block to hire me.’

‘Yeah, you sound like a bit of a sad, co-dependent loser when you put it that way.’

‘Thanks. Oh God. I’m mortified,’ Niamh said, cringing. ‘How did this happen? What am I going to do? I can’t stay out on sick leave for much longer. I already sent in one fake doctor’s note.’

‘How did you manage that?’ Grace asked, breaking off a second piece of croissant.

Niamh threw a look in her mother’s direction and lowered her voice. ‘I just wailed and bawled and talked about not loving myself under these circumstances, until he gave me a note to say I was incapable of work right now.’

‘But you’ve been out for a week. You made one claim of having lunatic tendencies and you got a sick certificate for a whole week?’

‘Yes, all I had to do was think of everyone talking about me at the office and I worked myself up into a right state. I can’t claim that I wasn’t actually a bit of a nutcase in the doctor’s office.’

‘Well, the longer you leave it the worse it will be. You’re still on sympathy leave right now ’cause people feel sorry for you, but if you stay out much longer then they’ll think you’ve actually become a bona fide nut job over this. Is that what you want?’

‘Of course it’s not what I want. I didn’t want any of this. I wanted to get married and live happily ever after.’

‘Well, that’s shot to shit.’

The dog gave another screech.

Mrs Kelly sighed. ‘For the love of God! I’m up to my elbows in suds here. Will one of you please rescue that creature and put him out in the back garden?’

Grace grabbed Marty and shoved him out of the back door. Ben gave a roar, which was intended to mean, ‘I want to go out, too.’

‘Use your words, Ben. I can’t understand you if you don’t use your words! O-U-T. Say out.’ Ben gave another roar and she shoved him out through the back door too.

‘What was it he said, again? That he can’t do it?’ she asked Niamh as she closed the back door.

‘ “I don’t want to do this any more.” ’

‘That’s so pathetic. Who says that? I mean, what actually was wrong with him? Do you think there’s someone else?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, no I don’t think so. I think I freaked him out.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, I had been dropping hints about moving in together and stuff like that and the last time I was over at his place I left some Homes & Gardens magazines lying around. Plus I had been hinting about the new batch of apartments being released next month, you know, the fancy ones on the canal? Then I asked him if he wanted to take a spin to IKEA on Saturday, just to have a look around. I think it all freaked him out. Are you going to eat the rest of that or what?’ Niamh nodded towards the mostly uneaten croissant.

‘No, you can have it.’

‘’Tis no wonder you have such a good figure, Grace,’ Mrs Kelly said as she folded up her rubber gloves. ‘I wish I had your discipline.’

‘Marvellous,’ Niamh said, rolling her eyes. ‘Oh well, I might as well add chunky and undisciplined to my list of offensive character traits.’ She stuffed the remainder of the croissant into her mouth.

‘You’re not chunky, Niamh. Stop being so hard on yourself. You’ve just been comfort-eating for the past week and you feel like shit. It’s a thing, you know. People comfort-eat when they are sad, then you put on a little weight and feel even worse about yourself. Look, shitty things happen, relationships end.