After a while she went away, leaving him alone with the brightening dawn that had no power over the darkness inside him.

‘Are you looking at those again?’ Toni Rinucci asked his wife warmly.

Hope smiled, looking up from the book of wedding photographs she was studying.

‘I can’t help it,’ she said. ‘They are so beautiful.’

‘But Ruggiero has been married for three months now,’ he said, naming one of their twin sons.

‘The pictures are still beautiful after three months,’ Hope said. ‘Look at little Matti.’

Ruggiero’s toddler son stood just in front of his father and Polly, his new stepmother. Although only two years old, he’d already managed to steal the limelight.

‘He looks like a little angel in that pageboy suit,’ Hope said sentimentally.

‘Yes-you’d never know that he’d covered it with mud ten minutes later,’ Toni observed with grandfatherly cynicism.

‘He’s real boy,’ Hope declared happily. ‘Oh, look!’

She’d reached the picture showing all six of her sons.

‘It’s so good to see them all together.’ She sighed. ‘Francesco has been away so much-first America, then England-but this time he was here. Oh, it’s so good to have him finally back where he belongs.’

Toni was silent as they went down the stairs together, and Hope, who could read his silences, glanced at him.

‘You don’t think so?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure he’s home to stay. He’s not a boy any more.’

‘But of course he won’t stay with us for ever,’ Hope conceded. ‘He’ll find his own place and move out. But we’ll still see him far more often than when he was living abroad.’

Hope made some coffee for the two of them, and took it out onto the terrace with its view over the bay. They both loved these moments when they had the house to themselves and could indulge in gossip about everyday matters-their household, their sons, their growing army of grandchildren, their upcoming thirty-fifth wedding anniversary-or just about nothing in particular.