If he didn’t take at least two steps backwards he was going to find his balls spewing out of his throat and his penis retracting into his blad‐ der. I was officially done with this shit.

“Excuse me,” I said, trying to slip past him even though he was midsentence on some topic that was ‘All About Him’. I had no idea why I was being polite.

“Shall I come with you?”

He grabbed my arm. He grabbed my fucking arm. I resisted the temptation to knee him hard in the testicles and make all my fantasies come true.

The bar was loud enough to make me raise my voice. “No thanks. I’m going to find my friends.” Who were at the bar. Together. Drinking margaritas. Together. While yet again, I was being hit on by a totally douche.

“But I thought we had a thing going here. You know, I’ve bought you a drink and we were mid-conversation about the choices I’m having to make about my career and...” I exhaled deeply and tried to seek my inner calm. Unfortunately, the bitch that was my inner calm had decided she was taking a vaca‐ tion in Hawaii and had left her cousins Tired and Stressed in her place. “Actually, I put my drink and your drink on my tab. You’re telling me about you, and haven’t asked me a single thing about me yet and you’re way too close into my personal space considering you’ve known me all of twenty minutes.” I could’ve been worse. To be fair, that was pretty tame for me.

He looked shocked, his overly large mouth gaping slightly open and his eyes wide. “I thought—”

“Look, Ed, I think this was never going anywhere. If you want to score here on a Friday evening you need to get a bit more creative. You know, ask a few questions, listen to her answers, at least pretend you’re interested in what she has to say and you never know, she might be drunk enough to go home with you,” I said, almost applying the cruelty filter. “Good luck in your search.”

He started to speak but I managed to find enough room to turn around and walk towards the door where my sister, Ava, was waiting for me, along with two of the girls I worked with at my law firm, Callaghan Green, where I was a commercial litigator—a commercial litigator who had endured an incredibly stressful and busy week ending in a huge win for my client.

The end of a case always depressed me somewhat. I liked the busy‐ ness of a big case with a lot at stake. I enjoyed the adrenaline rush and the deadlines, the battle of wits with the opposition. But when it was over I felt a huge sense of loss and something my counsellor had equated to grief. I wasn’t quite sure it went that far, but I would always get a little bit more tense than usual until the next client came along. I was aware I wasn’t quite sane.

“Do we need to let the bar staff know where you’re leaving his balls?” Ava said, her long blonde hair hanging in a curly mess. She was my youngest sibling, the baby of the seven of us, and looked the part of princess, a role she had always been given by our four older broth‐ ers, although Seph, my twin, was only just older than me.

I shook my head. “I left them attached. It was too much effort.” We headed outside into the spring London night. It was just about warm enough to be able to wear a jacket rather than a coat and I was dreaming of evenings sitting by the Thames with a cool beer and the warm sun on my shoulders. Those sorts of evenings were still a couple of months away, which made me feel even more like going home and burying myself in a good book and having a hot bath. “Where are we heading?”

Ava gestured to a side street. “Silvia’s. Unless you want to go pick up another mansplaining arsehole to insult for the evening.”

My sister was surprisingly sober. “I’m giving up on men,” I said, feeling better now the confession had met the air. “I’m done. I’m all about the job and my family and my friends.”

Ava raised her brows disbelievingly. “You said this about ten years ago and decided you were into girls instead.”

This was true. I had an experimental phase around the start of university as my boyfriend had been a cheat and an idiot. It had lasted about nine months, during which time my parents hadn’t raised a single eyebrow and had welcomed the single girlfriend I’d brought home with the same open arms they’d shown everyone else. “No. No relationships. No dating apps. No men. I’ve had enough with picking up wankers in bars.”

“Stop picking up wankers in bars then. Other places are available as are other sorts of men. Join a book club or go to the gym with someone who isn’t one of our brothers and therefore doesn’t look like a bodyguard. Ask Callum to set you up with one of his colleagues at the zoo.” Callum was our brother who wasn’t a lawyer. Instead he was a vet, one with his own YouTube channel and a very popular Insta‐ gram feed.

“Callum would probably try to set me up with a gorilla and video it to get a few thousand likes,” I said as we entered Silvia’s. “Besides, I don’t see you setting the dating world on fire.” Ava had been dateless for at least four weeks; I hadn’t even seen her on-again, off-again bed warmer Antonio about.

“The gorilla would probably have better grooming techniques than most of the men you’ve dated in the past twelve months, Payts. Regroup, consider what you want and then set about it the right way; not picking up dicks in bars when you’re both half-drunk. But joining the nearest nunnery is not going to make you happy. Decent sex and a few good orgasms should be mandatory,” Ava said, heading straight to the bar and ordering two margaritas.

Silvia’s was a small, very boutique-style, cocktail and bottled beer bar that was most popular straight after work or for a liquid lunch. It was quieter as it was later on and we perched on the barstools, accepting the small plate of stuffed vine leaves and a bowl of olives. It had a Greek theme and we knew the owner—who wasn’t called Silvia —well enough to be fed whatever bar snacks she hadn’t sold at lunch.

I stared at my sister, my two colleagues and a friend of Ava’s now in the bar with us. “Since when did you become an expert on decent sex and few good orgasms? I thought Antonio was yesterday’s headline?”

“He wasn’t much of a headline,” she said. “He had a good-enough sized cock that filled a hole but he really didn’t know what else to do with it.”

“Don’t let our brothers hear you say that,” I said, taking a sip from my margarita. “Else they’ll fill his hole. With cement.”

Ava laughed. “They’ve heard much worse from Claire. Have you heard from her today?”

Claire was our other sister, a few years older and currently very pregnant, which meant she was more argumentative than normal. The only person able to handle her was her soon-to-be-husband, Killian, and even he was looking slightly fraught. “A text this morning wishing me luck for when we received judgement and another letting me know that sex does not induce labour. I didn’t ask for details.”

“We should go see her tomorrow. At least try to be supportive while she has the world’s longest pregnancy. And it’ll give Killian a break from trying not to kill her,” I said, biting into a stuffed vine leaf. It tasted divine: all glorious carbs and flavour.

Ava groaned. “I need to go shopping for a house warming gift for Max tomorrow. Fuck knows what to get the couple who have every‐ thing.” Max was our eldest sibling and had just moved into a newly renovated house with his girlfriend, Victoria. “Let’s not have too many of these and we can go early.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why do you want an early start on a Saturday morning?” My sister was a notorious late riser on the week‐ ends. She flipped houses for a living and spent Monday to Friday on job sites, bossing about construction workers which meant starts earlier than seven am a lot of the time.

“I’m viewing a few houses tomorrow afternoon,” she said, knocking back the margarita and gesturing to the bartender for another two. “Time for a few new projects.”

I finished my own drink and felt slightly less cranky. Ava felt the same way I did when a project was finished. “Why can neither of us accept when we’re between jobs and just relax like normal people?”

“Because we’re not normal people,” Ava said. “We’re Callaghans.”