She could leave his fucking garden alone. God, she knew how to make him angry.

When she returned with coffee — milk jug and sugar bowl on a tray, despite the fact that neither of them took sugar, and a selection of biscuits which he knew neither of them would touch — he asked her about the magazine. "You renting an allotment or something?"

"Not mine," she said, her cheeks turning pink.

"Whose, then?" he said.

She pressed the plunger on the cafetiere. Her hand was shaking. "Just a friend."

Just a friend. She'd had a few of those since George died. "A good friend?" he asked.

"Well," she said. She poured a cup of coffee for him, half a cup for herself. "Well, yes, I'd have said so at one point. But now I'd have to say no."

"Sorry to hear that," Carlos said. "You want to talk about it?"

"I doubt any good would come of that." She reached behind her, pulled a bottle of vodka from the side of the settee. "Don't say a word." She unscrewed the top. "This is my house. My vodka. I can do as I wish."

He said nothing, picked up his cup, drank his coffee. She made good coffee. Hadn't always been that way. When he was a kid her coffee tasted like crap. He remembered his dad drinking cortados. Coffee the way it should be drunk. But back then Carlos's palate was too immature to appreciate it. And by the time he was old enough to do so, Pablo Morales had disappeared from their lives.

"So," she said, pouring a generous amount of vodka into her cup. "Work's slow?" She screwed the top back on the bottle.

"Yeah," he said, but he could have said anything. She'd already decided what she was going to say next.

She took a sip of her drink, blinked slowly. "Plumbing," she said. "It's never too late."

" Cago en tu leche."

She frowned, pouted her lips. "Something about milk?"

Something about shitting in it, but he wasn't about to tell her that. "I'm very fucking sorry I never became a plumber, Mama."