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parting gift for their holiday. They’d viewed the property from every conceivable angle in the photo gallery on the website – even so, as they entered the garden, the sight of the real thing stopped them in their tracks.
    “Oh, my goodness!” Mum said.
    They were on a stone-flagged terrace, patterned in marshmallow pink and white, overlooking a glittering swimming pool and, beyond that, the land descended to a bay – a swathe of blue-green sea so still it might have been painted there. Just the other side of the garden’s low stone wall, a solitary goat grazed in the shade of an olive tree. Their appearance on the terrace caused the goat to lift its head with a jerk and cast an inscrutable stare in their direction.
    “Hey, look – springboard,” her brother said, nodding at the pool.
    Dec had found a tennis ball and was bouncing it on the flagstones. Bounce–catch, bounce–catch. With his dark hair and olive skin, he could almost pass for Greek.
    “This is so —”
    “Beautiful,” Shiv said, finishing Mum’s sentence.
    “It’s very foreign, isn’t it?” Declan said.
    “Funny that.” Shiv gave him a friendly shove and the tennis ball popped out of his hand, bounced down the steps and into the pool with barely a splash.
    “You know,” Mum said, “I think this is even better than Sardinia.”
    Shiv gave a mock gasp. “But that was ‘the villa to end all villas’.”
    “The goat isn’t happy,” Declan said. “Look, he’s at the end of his tether.”
    Mum and Shiv groaned. Shiv felt a bubble of joy well up; the first day of a holiday could sometimes be fraught – the travelling, the tiredness – but not this one.
    She went down the steps, skirted the pool and stood on the wall at the bottom of the garden to take a look at the bay. From there, she could see the zigzag path through the dunes that led to the beach they’d read about on the website – a gentle stroll brings you to a quaint fishing village with its welcoming tavernas, and just beyond the harbour, an unspoilt sandy beach ideal for swimming . She spread her arms, closed her eyes and tilted her face into the sun.
    Which was when the wet tennis ball smacked her in the back of the head.
    “First strike of the holiday to the Boy Declan. Oh, yesssss .”
    By the time she’d caught Dec and brought him sprawling onto the grass, they were weak with laughter. They untangled and flopped onto their backs, side by side, gasping for breath.
    “You fight like a girl,” she said.
    “So do you, as it happens.”
    Sisters weren’t meant to like their kid brothers, especially when the brother was too smart for his own good. Her friends hated theirs. Declan, though, had always made Shiv laugh, right from when he started to talk. He was her mate. Often, they didn’t need to speak to know what the other one was thinking, or to set themselves off laughing over some private, unfathomable joke.
    In cahoots , Mum called it. You two are always in cahoots over something . Dad reckoned they were twins who happened to have been born two and a half years apart.
    She even liked his clothes. Borrowed them, sometimes. Like he was an older sister rather than a younger brother. That baggy T-shirt he was wearing now, for instance – a birthday present he’d barely taken off since he got it – that was pretty cool, with its line from The Catcher in the Rye :
    Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody .
    Not that Shiv was altogether sure what it meant.
    One time, Aunt Rosh had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and, without a moment’s hesitation, he’d said, “Holden Caulfield.”
    Now, Mum joined them on the lawn, sitting on one of the wicker sunloungers. She’d got the camera out already and was firing off the first of what would no doubt be several hundred holiday snaps. She might’ve been posing for a glamour photo herself – yellow summer dress dazzling in the glare, the villa reflected in duplicate in