He leaned and said quietly, into her ear, ‘Tara, tell me if I can help? We’re not … technically … at work now?’

David’s breath tickled her neck. It smelled of gin, and wine, and flowers. Midsummer and the colour lilac and foxgloves and silver stars. Tara shook her head slowly, from side to side, and the edge of her ear connected with David’s warm lips. A tingle of electricity ran across her bare skin.

Don’t let yourself be hypnotized. Be strong. Fill your head with bubble wrap.

But her skin still tingled and prickled, and Tara ached to turn and let David’s lips graze her cheek, then her mouth.

Don’t add to the mess.

She said the right thing. ‘We should go down to the gong bath.’

David didn’t seem keen to move. Tara could feel him next to her, his face still close, though she couldn’t see him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yup.’ She wiped a tear away quickly. ‘Better go now.’

‘Because …?’

‘Come on,’ she said. And wobbled determinedly down the stairs to the kitchen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tara was no stranger to a hangover, but the mornings after the Wellness Centre’s parties were always particularly grim. It was something about the combination of cheap alcohol mixed with undercooked vol-au-vents and the looming fear of having said something she shouldn’t without even knowing.

She rolled over in bed tentatively, very conscious of her brain inside her skull. A nasty smell of vomit hung in the room, and for the first time in many years Tara wondered if she’d blanked out a section of the evening. The part where she ate an entire bowl of cold stir-fry and threw it up over the duvet.

Once she prised open her mascara-crusted eyes, however, it became clear that the vomit wasn’t her problem. Rather, it was her problem to deal with, but she could cross random puking off her list of things to feel bad about.

Sybil was curled up so tightly on Tara’s discarded dress that her head was invisible. She looked like a very sad puddle of black cat. All around her were lumpy pools of yellow puke. Tiny flecks of it speckled her fur. When Tara moved, she didn’t shoot off into the corner as she normally did, but made a muffled noise that was so far from her normal empress attitude that Tara felt a real pang of concern through her hangover.

‘What the hell, Sybil?’ She went to throw back the duvet then realized that would be a terrible idea, given the pools of sick on it.

Instead she reached out a shaky hand for her phone, and started Googling local vets with Saturday opening hours.