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I stilled, the words sharp inside me. The blossom shrivelled like the weak thing it was. I didn’t like flowers anyway.

‘You’re a winner, Lori. No matter how much you add to your palmarès this year, even if a thousand horses cross your path, you’re a winner. I wanted to help you see that tonight, but it all went wrong.’

All wrong was a good way to describe that day, but I still struggled to regret it.

‘Go and fight. You deserve it – everything. I’d love to be your consolation prize, but you have to go for your main prize – right? Look to the future? You didn’t want any distractions this year and this… whatever we’re doing…’

‘Nudging each other,’ I muttered. ‘That’s all we were doing.’

His lips twitched and he smoothed a strand of my hair between his thumb and forefinger, making me shudder at the tenderness I didn’t know how to bear. ‘Nudging,’ he repeated with a wobbly smile. ‘It was nice nudging you, but… I don’t want to bring you down. You should be… up.’

He drew away and headed for the door to the lobby, leaving me to stumble after him, dazed, mixed up. Thankfully the hallways were empty as most of the team were sensibly flopped on their beds, groaning.

Seb knocked on his door briefly before opening up to retrieve my phone, while I hopped from foot to foot in the corridor. He greeted his roommate quietly and reappeared at the door with my phone and an earnest look.

‘See you…’ I wouldn’t have known how to finish that sentence either.

I was about to have a go at saying something – probably choked and stupid – when a loud voice from down the hall made us both jump. ‘Lori! What the fuck? Dad’s been calling you for hours!’

Hearing Colin was enough to banish the last of that soft, weak version of me.

Gallaghers had steel instead of vertebrae, so I turned to my brother with a shrug, flapping my phone nonchalantly.

‘I forgot it in Seb’s room,’ I said, offering no further explanation.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll let Dad know I’m not dead. But now I’m going to bed.’

I turned away from both of them, heading for my door at the other end of the hall.

I’d never been so relieved to have remembered my keycard, retrieving it out of the pocket of my tracksuit bottoms. Slipping into the dark room silently, I leaned back against the door while I got my breath under control.

Seb was right. I should be looking at the next race. Moonlight and romantic cities were for losers, even if that thought made my nose sting at the sudden image of him holding someone else’s hand while they meandered through the narrow lanes.

God, even when I’d been spending all my spare time with Gaetano, I’d never been so far off the map as this. Thoughts of luck were counterproductive. Seb had told me to fight, so I’d fight.

I heard a rustling in the corner as my roommate rolled over. ‘Are you okay, Lore?’ Doortje asked groggily.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘But don’t wake me for breakfast in the morning.’

Forceful claps on my back from my dad and Colin’s annoyingly self-satisfied posture helped me shed the remaining hints of my wobble from the night before as we piled into a taxi to take us to the airport an hour away in Florence.

‘Leave it all behind, hey, Molly?’ Dad said.

I nodded wordlessly, definitely not sad about everything else I would leave behind in Siena.

As Dad went back to retrieve a final suitcase from the lobby, Colin loped up to me, dipping his head to say quietly, ‘I found this outside your door this morning before you got up and I thought I should look after it for you in case Dad saw it.’ He slipped a paper bag into my hands, giving me an assessing look.

‘Seb wasn’t at breakfast either. Do I have to beat someone up? ’

Swallowing a fresh surge of those pesky feelings from last night – embarrassment, shame and a prick of longing – I snatched the bag, crinkling it a little in my fist. ‘No common assault required, Brothernator. But watch your own nose if you stick it too far into my business.’

His pained look wasn’t what I was expecting. Perhaps my attempt at banter had sounded as weak as it had felt. ‘I’m here for you, monster. I’m trying to be here for you.’

‘And I’m your big sister and always will be,’ I retorted. ‘I was injured, not quitting!’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Dad said with a grin as he emerged from the lobby.

Hurriedly concealing the paper bag behind my back, I had to admit – only to myself – that I appreciated what Colin had done for me in picking it up.

Strapped into the back of the cab, I waited for Colin to predictably fall asleep and Dad to be deep in conversation with the cabbie, and then dived for the mysterious gift.

Peering into the packet, I found a clear plastic box with gold writing on the outside and a velvet pillow.

Jimmying it open as quietly as possible, I tugged out a fine gold chain with two medallions hanging off it.

The first bore a relief image of a woman in mediaeval armour holding a sword, with the words ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ around the edge.

And the second showed a monk feeding a wolf, surrounded by other animals, with two birds flying overhead.

I didn’t need to read the ‘San Francesco’ on the side to know this was the patron saint of animals.

With a wobbly smile, I dropped the necklace back into the box and shoved it into my backpack.