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would be best if I moved out,’ she said.
    He looked at her for a moment without replying.
    ‘You think that’s the answer, don’t you?’ she said, tears starting up again.
    ‘I don’t know, Daisy,’ he said wearily, running his fingers distractedly through his hair. ‘But I know I’m sick of being piggy-in-the-middle.’

Chapter Two
    Daisy woke as Fred jumped on to her bed to lick her face.
    ‘Don’t,’ she said sleepily, pulling the duvet up to cover herself. But Fred burrowed his nose under it to find her, and she was suddenly wide awake and remembering the events of the night before.
    She had heard Dad and Lucy come back from the hospital at about half past ten, but they went into the sitting-room with Tom and shut the door behind them. Someone must have come up later to see if she was asleep, otherwise Fred wouldn’t have been able to get into her room this morning, but she hadn’t heard them. She wondered if it had been her father wanting to get to the bottom of what happened with the knife.
    She touched her nose gingerly. It felt very sore, so she reached out for a mirror on her bedside table, at the same time noticing it was only seven o’clock.
    Her nose was badly swollen, and there was bruising under both her eyes, but although it made her look gross, at least it was evidence that Lucy wasn’t blameless. Joel had said he was going to come round in the evening and take her out for a quiet meal, but she didn’t think they’d be going anywhere now, not with her looking as if she’d been in a road accident.
    She lay down again and tried to get back to sleep, but her mind kept churning over the previous day’s events. She was ashamed that such an important day had been trivialized by her and Lucy fighting, wishing she’d walked away and ignored her sister when she started the argument. If Joel hadn’t had to return to work straight after the funeral, she doubted anything would have happened. Lucy was never nasty in front of him.
    Yet she’d called him a pig. Was that just to rile Daisy, or did she secretly hate him too?
    Daisy sighed deeply. One of the things she liked best about Joel was the fact that he got on with everyone. After so many years of having boyfriends no one approved off, it felt good to be with someone who was admired and respected. Trust Lucy to undermine the one thing Daisy was sure of.
    She closed her eyes and remembered when she first met Joel at a wine bar in Hammersmith over a year ago. She had noticed the big man wearing a tight black tee-shirt and jeans sitting at the next table to her and her girlfriends. In fact she’d whispered to them that he looked like a sex bomb. After a few drinks she’d knocked her handbag on to the floor, and the contents, much of it embarrassing, had spilled all over the place. He’d leapt up to help her pick everything up and had teased her about having a spanner and a screw-driver, asking her if they were burglary tools.
    At the time she was sharing a flat with some girlfriends just across the road from the wine bar and she’d often voiced her opinion that it was impossible to find a man who was solvent, kind, reliable, trustworthy and sexy Yet Joel turned out to be all those things and more. He made her laugh, he was strong and fit, and he was charmingly old-fashioned too.
    Joel believed in real courtship. He bought her flowers the first time he took her out, and didn’t try to get her into bed until their third date. Yet once they did go to bed, they were never out of it. In all her relationships with men she’d never known such utter bliss.
    Maybe it was as well that they had all that wild passion then, because it had come to a somewhat abrupt end. First Joel got accepted by Hendon Police Academy, then she’d moved home again because her mum was ill, and they’d had precious few opportunities lately for anything more than a quick snog.
    ‘Do you want to marry him?’ she asked herself, recalling how her mother had said she must be