‘Yeah, you made it worse – you were everything I wanted to be: sophisticated, worldly. I hoped you’d walk past and leave us alone. Me and the dress, I mean.’

At the time I thought I was safely hidden in the shadows of her superiority, but her heels stuttered to a halt beside me.

‘Beautiful colour,’ she’d said approvingly, nodding at the frock.

I’d hung it back on the rack, in the middle, hiding it where it was less likely to catch someone else’s eye.

‘I told you it wasn’t my kind of thing – save you thinking I was delusional. But you didn’t go away. You came around in front of me and stepped right into my line of vision, looking me up and down through your sunglasses, your red lips the same colour as your suit. You walked your fingers along the hangers and found it again, the lime green-and-turquoise dress, and unhooked it from the rack, lifted it up to the sunlight to admire. ‘So beautiful,’ you murmured.

She’d balanced the hook of the hanger on her finger and let the frock dangle. In the breeze the weight of the crystals and the built-in shaping made it flash and dance under the spotlight of the sun. The crystals sprinkled light around us like confetti.

‘I thought you were going to buy it.’ If she’d bought it then, in front of me, I swear I would have killed her.

But after admiring it for herself she made room for it again in the middle of the rail and closed the other dresses around to hide it, just as I’d done, and regarded me over the top of her shades. Her eyes were dark and intelligent. She seemed to look at me for a long time and I didn’t look away – I trusted her in the same way that I’d trust a doctor who’d called me in urgently and was studying my notes, with that same sense of fatalism, of my future being in her hands.

‘Don’t do it,’ she said.

‘No, I’m not going to. It’s too small.’

‘Not the frock. I mean your plan. You have a plan, don’t you, that you want to carry out? I’m telling you. Don’t.’

I shook my head, ashamed and confused. It was as if she could see the paracetamol that I’d been popping out of the blister packs into my jewellery box, to see me through my lonely evenings. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Dinah Moss pushed the handles of her bag up to the crook of her elbow and put her hand to the pearls at her throat. ‘My mistake. I apologise.’