Sunrise by the Sea (Little Beach Street Bakery #4) - Colgan, Jenny Page 0,3

Marisa and her brother, Gino. Marisa tried not to take it personally.

But her grandfather had stepped into the breach, and then some. Her fondest memories were golden: holidays spent in Italy; long days on the hot windy shores of Imperia, as the great big industrial ships rolled past; late dreamy evenings at restaurants as she ate spaghetti vongole and fell asleep under the table as the adults talked and laughed long into the night; cool hands rubbing in cream to sunburned shoulders; ice creams as big as a beach ball; stones underfoot as you ran into the water; the pungent scent of the exhausts of the Vespas of the young men gunning around the town, a contrast with the smartly uniformed navale stationed there; the long rolling rhythms of Italian summers.

Abandoned in her teens for holidays with her British friends on cheap packages in the Balearics, drinking shots and laughing uproariously, they sometimes, in her memory, felt like a dream; snatches of an older language tugging somewhere at the fraying edges of her brain, another person, happy and free, in big fussy-bowed dresses her grandmother – who was as stiff as her grandfather was loving – liked to buy her, and which she adored and her mother thought were absolutely awful.

Then life interfered, took her to college and on to Exeter and a job she used to love – being a registrar for the council. Births, marriages and deaths, it required a combination of a love for and interest in people, with a fairly meticulous approach to record-keeping, and nice handwriting. Marisa was not a show-offy type of person at all, but she was incredibly proud of her handwriting.

Then Carlo had died.

‘There’s no rhyme nor reason,’ her nice but very harassed GP had told her, when she explained the insomnia, the constant crying and, increasingly difficult for work, her encroaching fear of leaving the house and speaking to people, that seemed to get worse every day. ‘Grief affects everyone differently. It seems to me you have an anxiety disorder, shading into agoraphobia. I would suggest the best course is antidepressants.’

‘My grandfather died!’ Marisa had said. ‘I’m sad! I’m not “depressed”! This is normal.’

‘I’m just saying that they would almost certainly help.’

‘But then . . .’

Marisa fell silent.

‘What if I don’t even miss him any more? What if I don’t feel anything?’

The GP, too, fell silent, wanting to be reassuring; unable to mislead.

‘The wait for counselling is very long,’ she said finally.

‘Put me on it,’ said Marisa. ‘Please. Please.’

‘Okay,’ said the GP.

‘Why?’ said Marisa. ‘Why am I the only person who can’t get on with their life?’

The nice GP shook her head sadly.

‘It only looks that way,’ she said. ‘Don’t be fooled for a moment.’

She hadn’t been able to make it in time. He’d been out pruning in the garden, in the big black hat he wore all the time, probably, and had collapsed. No time to call, no time to say goodbye to the most important man in her life.

People saying he wouldn’t have known a thing about it, that it was better that way, did not, in Marisa’s opinion, know what the hell they were talking about. Did they seriously think he wouldn’t have wanted to say goodbye to the family he loved so much: her mother Lucia, her sister Ann Angela (actually Anna Angelica but quite the mouthful by anyone’s standards), the boys, and . . . well, her?

Somehow, she found the funeral, which she had to dash to, even more difficult. Her nonna, or grandmother, garbed in black, was cross and busy in the kitchen, insisting on cooking for thousands and refusing, in Marisa’s eyes, to face up to what was happening at all. And there was so many people – cousins, family, friends, bloody butcher and baker and candlestick maker – talking about how much they’d loved him (and, by inference, how much he had loved them in return), that the entire noisy family felt overwhelming on that wet October Italian day, and there was so much shouting and noise and Marisa, who had always been quiet, had retreated further into her shell, worrying that, after all, the love she had felt from her grandfather had meant little amid the clamour. He had been quiet too. She yearned for his big hand in her smaller one; couldn’t believe that she would never feel it again. But everyone else’s grief had felt louder, more pressing. And so she had taken hers home, let it sit, forming inside