Jackie twirled his moustache, smiling. ‘Worth every second of the three years it took you to grow. It’s wasted on all of us. It ought to be in a moustache museum.’

Joanna Walker checked her bank statement, as she did every day now since The Discovery.

When her husband Mark had left her for upwardly mobile PR exec Amanda, she’d assumed their finances were in order, since he’d always seemed very financially savvy. According to Mark, Jo was ‘an arty-farty type with her nose constantly in a book’, and he would therefore take over all things financial. And she’d let him.

Ladies, a lesson. Never leave all the money matters to your husband, no matter how much you think you can trust him.

It was no longer the 1950s, when women didn’t understand money and men were possessed of godlike wisdom, as Jo had found to her cost. Mark had emptied their joint account and borrowed against anything he could. She’d thought of trying to sue but instead had worked flat out as an events organizer. Now, three years later, she was solvent and their house was safe.

And now Mark and Amanda were getting married.

And although Jo thought she’d got over the worst of the heartbreak from the divorce, the news of their engagement was still ripping her apart. Despite all her mindfulness and effing CBT her mind kept going back to this wedding and comparing it to their own happy day, which had seemed so full of love and hope and promise. Huh.

The mornings were the worst, somehow. When you woke, your mind was raw and undefended. Instead of feeling angry, she started to ask herself if it had partly been her fault. Had she let him down somehow? The truth was, when your husband dumped you for someone else, you couldn’t avoid feeling a failure.

But she mustn’t let herself go down that road. Trying to revive some healthy cynicism, Joanna thought of messaging Amanda that she’d better keep her money in her own account – but the irony would probably be lost on her. She didn’t seem the brightest of sparks.

Instead, Jo longed to get away.

The trouble was, she was busy with a big exhibition and it would be letting down her daughter Sophie, who ran the business with her, if she just disappeared. Besides which, the wedding might affect Sophie too, though all she had said so far was ‘I hope she dresses like a teenager at a school disco like she usually does. She’ll look bloody ridiculous!’