‘My reasons…? So Luke loves me, I know that. But in some ways—okay, lots of ways—he’s unavailable. You know that, right? So when I found out he’d once been married, I…Wow, it was a big shock. She must have been one amazing lady.’

‘Oh-kay.’

‘I want to figure him out. I thought you were one of the clues.’

Should I tell her that she’d probably never figure him out? Let’s face it, once upon a time he’d been absolutely mad about me and look at how that had turned out.

*

Somebody had bought ‘my’ Chanel bag! At first I couldn’t believe it. I clicked and scrolled, up and down, up and down, changing the search parameters and starting all over again. When the truth dawned, I was almost as unsettled as if my actual handbag had been stolen. For a few uncomfortable seconds, I felt genuinely bereft. Now what would I obsess about?

However, going by past behaviour, finding something new to fixate on shouldn’t prove difficult. As I cycled swiftly through emotions, I landed on anticipation, wondering what kind of surprising lunacy would snap me up. I hoped it would be another unattainable bag—they provided so much distraction in exchange for very little trouble. Not like, say, wheelbarrows, which were just-about-affordable and very unwieldy. (I’d bought one last summer after thirteen blurry days of head-racing obsessing. It was delivered to work, proved too big to fit in my car and Murdo had to borrow a friend’s van to get it to my house. And after all that drama it had only been used three times.)

*

‘I hate having to do this.’ Jonah, a slight sprite of a boy, stared sightlessly at his cooling cup of tea.

‘It’s hard,’ I said. ‘I know. But you’re helping her.’

‘She will lose the fucking head.’ Naaz bit her lip and reached for another biscuit. ‘Seriously, Rachel—is it okay to call you Rachel?—it’s going to be the apocalypse.’

‘It might not. Will we go?’

Murdo was already in the Abbots Quarter. When I walked in, followed by Jonah and Naaz, Ella looked stupefied with shock. Her mouth half opened, then froze. Only her eyes moved, flicking anxiously as Jonah and Naaz took their seats.

I flashed back twenty years to when Luke and Brigit surprised me by appearing one morning in this very same room and promptly blew the gig wide open. Jesus, I’d nearly died from shock and shame.

‘Morning, all.’ I smiled. ‘As you can see, we’ve been joined by two people.’ I asked them to introduce themselves.

Jonah cleared his throat. ‘I’m Ella’s boyfriend, have been for about three years. We live together.’

‘And I’m her friend Naaz. I share the house with her and Jonah.’

‘And you’ve come this morning because…?’ I looked to Jonah to kick things off.

‘Ella has been taking sleeping tablets—’