Just to let you know Sybil’s had a bit of an upset tum and had to go to the vet. She’s fine now, though! That was OK, wasn’t it? Updating him on his cat wasn’t needy. How’s the building work going? Let me know when I can come and see the finished masterpiece! Miss you. xxx

That was a bit passive aggressive, she thought, ten seconds after she’d pressed send. But it was too late. The message had gone.

It didn’t entirely surprise her that no reply was forthcoming. What did surprise her was the £100 that appeared in her bank account a few days later, with the reference SYBIL VET.

But no mention of the builders.

Tara’s workload gave her the perfect excuse to avoid David, and everyone else in the Wellness Centre who might have seen her drunken behaviour at the party, for a few days.

There had been a couple of moments on Monday that made her wonder if her and David’s simultaneous disappearance had been noted. She’d spotted Emily sidling up to Bryan and Lionel while they were reheating their lunchtime soup, moving in a similar way to Sybil when there were blue tits on the bird feeder, and conversation between Kasia and Bridget, the art therapist, had ceased abruptly when she walked in on Tuesday. Tara kept her head high, thought of the Centre Director job (Jacqueline had hinted that the advert was ‘imminent’), and said nothing.

As for David, she really didn’t know what to do. Part of her wondered if she should inform Jacqueline that her star therapist was delusional, but knowing what she knew about David’s past, Tara couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was a joke. And if it was, she ran the risk of looking like a snitch and humourless. And what if Jacqueline had put him up to it, as a sort of management test? Her brain wasn’t up to the complications. Tara politely excused herself from their lunchtime walks by pleading a hideous backlog of paperwork – which was true enough – and was even more confused by how much she missed his breezy tour-guide routine.

By the time Thursday evening rolled around, Tara was finally ahead on her to-do list, but feeling lonelier than she had done in some time. To the point where she was almost looking forward to seeing her dad again for their arranged dinner date.

Keith had suggested eating at The Swan, Longhampton’s nicest hotel on the edge of town, where he was staying overnight. It wasn’t somewhere Tara had been before, though she’d been aware of its gala opening a few years ago: her mother had been there a few times for lunch with friends, and had decreed it ‘persuasively comfortable’, which was high praise.