She says, trying not to sound too interested, ‘So, what exactly did she leave me?’

Thomas places his drink down squarely on its coaster and meets her eyes. ‘She left you her house.’

‘Her house?’

‘Yep, her house.’

‘Her house on Scribbly Gum Island?’

‘That’s the one.’

Sophie is staggered. Her ex-boyfriend’s aunt, a woman she barely knew, has left her a house. A beautiful house. An extraordinary house.

It is very inappropriate and it is probably, somehow, her fault.

So she blushes.

Of course she blushes. Sophie is a blusher. It isn’t cute or funny. It’s a disorder. It even has a name: ‘Idiopathic Craniofacial Erythema’, or ‘severe facial blushing’. Her blush isn’t a petal-pink virginal stain stealing disarmingly up her neck; it’s a burning, blotchy, all-enveloping beetroot, a phenomenon which is impossible for even the most tactful person to ignore, or the least observant person to miss. Her fair skin doesn’t help. Like fine porcelain, her mother says proudly, as if she’d purchased her complexion at David Jones. Like a corpse, her friend Claire says.

She’s been blushing since she was seven. She knows this because she can remember her first blush. Her mother had dropped her off at school and Sophie was trotting into the playground when she heard the toot of a horn and turned to see her mum leaning out of the car window waving her teddy bear and calling, ‘Sophie, darling, did you remember to kiss Teddy goodbye?!’ A dozen kids witnessed this profoundly humiliating incident, including Bruno Tripodopolous, the most glamorously wicked boy in her class. (Twelve years later she dated Bruno for two weeks, during which time they had a lot of vigorous sex and only spoke when absolutely necessary. Even when she was seven, before she knew what sex was, some part of her must have known that Bruno would be good at it.) When Sophie heard Bruno making smacking sounds with his lips she was shattered. Her face went boiling-hot purple. Bruno stopped snickering and looked at her with scientific interest, calling over his friends to ‘Come check out what’s happened to Sophie’s head!’ Her mother instantly grasped the enormity of her error and quickly withdrew Teddy from the car window, but it was too late. Sophie was thenceforth a blusher.

‘What colour is red?’ the boys used to yell, squashing their cheeks together like gargoyles. ‘Sophie’s face, Sophie’s face!’ ‘Oh, poor Sophie is embarrassed,’ the girls would snigger with fake sympathy. ‘Poor Sophie is shy.’ For the rest of that year she spent every recess and lunchtime hidden under the tuckshop stairs with another outcast, a boy called Eddie Ripple, who had a horrendous facial twitch. They were the school ‘retards’, until Eddie left and Sophie, in the same way that fat kids learn to be funny, learned to be extremely social and eventually became popular, so much so that she was voted school captain in high school. She can now walk straight into a cocktail party of strangers and within five minutes be part of the group that’s laughing the loudest and making everyone else feel jealous and left out. But she has never managed to fully vanquish the blush and it continues to make regular appearances at the most inconvenient times.

‘This must be a mistake,’ she says to Thomas as her face heats up as reliably as a hotplate. ‘She can’t have left me her house. That’s ridiculous.’

Thomas looks everywhere except at her. He is one of those people who writhe in empathetic embarrassment whenever she blushes. They really had been quite incompatible.

‘I’ve seen the paperwork,’ he says. ‘It’s all very clear.’

Sophie picks up a piece of ice from her glass and holds it against her forehead. ‘But I would have thought she’d leave the house to you or Veronika. Or your cousin. The beautiful one who does the children’s books. Veronika said she just had a new baby. What is her name again? Grace?’

‘Yes, Grace. Well, Grace has just moved into her mother’s place on the island. Aunt Laura has gone travelling for a year and Grace and her husband are building a home. Maybe Aunt Connie thought they didn’t need another one. Anyway, apparently she has left all three of us some money.’

‘But she hardly knew me! And my history with your family isn’t that good, is it?’

Thomas smiles slightly and doesn’t say anything.

‘What does your mother say? Oh, God, what does Veronika say? I hope they don’t think I somehow manipulated your aunt! I complimented her on her house, that’s all. I didn’t mean I wanted it!’

‘I know,’ says Thomas. ‘I was there.’

But Sophie is in agonies of guilt because this sort of thing has been happening to her all her life–although on a much smaller scale. She admires some person’s belonging, and the next thing she knows they are absolutely insisting she take it as a gift, which naturally causes Sophie to blush. ‘Darling, don’t be so heartfelt when you like something,’ her mother advises her. ‘It’s when you get that shiny-eyed look.’

She probably did have that shiny-eyed look when she visited Aunt Connie’s house, because she loved it. She absolutely loved it.

‘The thing is,’ says Thomas, ‘Veronika doesn’t know yet–and you’re right, she probably will be upset. Have you heard about her latest idea? She reckons she’s writing a book about the Munro Baby Mystery. She’s got a bet with Dad that she’s going to solve it. She was interviewing Aunt Connie the night before she died. Mum thinks she probably talked her to death. Anyway, if I know Veronika she’ll still want to go on writing it, and of course it would suit her right down to the ground to live in Aunt Connie’s house. She hasn’t really got herself settled since the divorce. She’s living in a share house and driving her flatmates insane; they only put up with her because they like her cooking. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets it into her head to contest the will.’

‘Well, that’s the solution, then!’ says Sophie. She can feel her face settling back to normal. ‘It’s obvious. I won’t take the house. Veronika can have it!’

‘I think Aunt Connie was worried you might say something like that,’ says Thomas. ‘She left you this letter.’

From his jacket pocket he pulls out a plain white envelope with the word ‘Sophie’ written on the front in firm black letters. ‘Just read it first before you decide anything. If you decide you want the house then I won’t let Veronika contest the will.’