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after thinking there had only been orange marzipan left. Finally, her eyes lighted upon one in particular. It had a very nice black frame.
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    Kind and loving nanny wanted for busy professional household in Highgate Village, London. Clean driving license, nonsmoker essential. Sole charge of eight-year-old, six-year-old, and four-year-old. Sole use of Renault Clio, suite of rooms with television and DVD.
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    She thought at first that the weekly salary was the PO box number. She read it again, slower. Then she read it once more.
    Highgate Village. It was a pretty, quaint-sounding name, yet it was in London. She hadn’t been to London since her midteens when a crowd of friends had gone clubbing there. She remembered the exhilaration at how alive with possibilities it had felt, even in the middle of the night. She looked back at the ad.
    Three children—she’d never looked after three children before, but she knew as sure as she knew her own name that she desperately needed a challenge. And the car…And the suite of rooms.
    After reading it a couple of times, she could feel her heart beating. New and dazzling thoughts began to starburst into her mind. With that much money, she could actually put some aside—maybe even save for the first time in her life. Come back home and put a deposit on a little flat. Or use it to pay for a college course…she was still young. She could start again; her parents would understand—
    She suddenly pulled in the reins—she could never leave Mum and Dad. It wouldn’t be fair—they needed her now more than ever.
    â€œYou can keep it,” came Edwina’s voice. “There’s sod all in there for me.”
    Jo looked up at her.
    â€œOh no—”
    â€œHere,” said Edwina. “Take it.” And she lifted it from Jo’s hands, folded it roughly, and squeezed it into Jo’s bag between Davey’s beloved Thunderbirds companions Scot and Virgil.
    Â 
    That night, Hilda and Bill weren’t talking. Bill had had his tea at the pub—steak and chips—instead of waiting till he got home for steamed greens and cod. They were furious with each other, and the television became that night’s weapon of choice.
    â€œYou’re not watching this crap, are you?” said Hilda, every time Bill zapped the channels over to the program he wanted to watch.
    Jo didn’t particularly want to look at the screen, but neither did she want to catch her mother’s eye. For want of anywhere else to look, she looked at the door into the hall.
    â€œWhat’s up?” asked her mother.
    â€œI’m going to make a call,” she heard herself say.
    â€œAlright, love. No need to ask permission.”
    And with that, Jo went into the hall and phoned the Fitzgeralds in Highgate, London.

Chapter 2
    There was so much to take in, Jo didn’t know where to look first. The Highgate house had seemed small from the outside, smaller even than her parents’. It was a nondescript end-of-terrace Victorian house with no front garden. It had only one window facing the ugly north London road that looked nothing like a village, with or without a high gate. And the road was so jammed with enormous four-by-fours Jo wondered if they were occasionally used as extra rooms.
    She rang the doorbell and waited. Eventually a hassled Francesca, soon-to-be-ex nanny, opened the front door, and Jo stared at the Tardis in front of her.
    The entrance hall was practically a room in itself, with bright Victorian floor tiles and ceiling cornicing framing a filigree radiator cover. A chaise longue stretched across the opposite wall, with a mock Victorian-style telephone on the minute table next to it. The walls were painted a sumptuous red. Wordlessly, Francesca motioned Jo to wait in the living room and shut the door behind her. There Jo stood, executing a slow-motion 360-degree turn, trying to take in as much as possible in as little time as