And then she remembered. As they bustled into the back of the taxi on the way from the bar to the restaurant, the panicked moment when she felt for her phone and found it wasn’t in her bag. Convinced that she must have left it at Davy’s, she asked Ivan for his phone to call hers, and when it rang it was in her coat pocket, exactly where she had left it. Without even realising it, she had given him her number, stored casually in his recent calls list.

Had he known in that moment that he had it? she wondered, ignoring the thrill that rushed through her. Had he intended all along to make this more than a one-off event? What had he thought when he looked at her?

It was there, in the taxi, that he had wrapped his arm around her for the first and only time that evening, and, for those moments as they swept through London, the rain against the window restricting the outside world to nothing more than murmurs of light against black, she allowed herself to rest against him.

Her fingers hovered between Reply and Delete until she heard Sadie’s voice from the other side of the cubicle door. ‘Mum?’

She stood and flushed the toilet. ‘Hey, Sadie. You all finished?’

‘Yeah, Dad told me to tell you to hurry up. We’re going to get pizza.’

‘OK, darling.’ She switched her phone off and stuffed it in her back pocket. ‘I’m coming right now.’

‘What were you thinking for dinner?’ she asked once they were back at home, following a brief post-lunch trip to the playground on the Heath where they’d watched the kids hurtling across the same obstacles they’d been tackling since they were toddlers.

‘I wasn’t – I’m not that hungry, we just had lunch.’

She paused, but already Tom’s reaction rattled inside her, vibrating so that there was nowhere for it to go except outwards; it was as if they had passed through some invisible door in their relationship so that any respect she might once have held for the notion of treating each conversation with Tom, each interaction, in isolation, had been permanently lost. Now and seemingly for evermore, every exchange between them was a continuation of a previous one; every syllable he uttered that irked her simply the next instalment in an ongoing dialogue designed in a way that seemed it would never end.

She felt herself lurch from zero to ninety in a single sentence, though nothing was any different to how it had always been; Tom ordering twice as much as everyone else, merrily pulling out the joint card only she ever paid into when the waitress arrived.

‘Yes, Tom, but the children need to eat three times a day, if you hadn’t noticed. Anyway, no one else ate quite as much as you …’

‘All right, I didn’t realise we were on rations …’