First stop: the yellow-painted house on Bar Terrace where her friend Nina had lived. It had been something of a party house, due to the cellar where their friends’ band had practised and the fact that Nina’s parents were fantastically laidback about all the cider-drinking and smoking that had gone on down there. It was also where she and Aidan had had their first kiss at a New Year’s party when they were sixteen, out in the garden near the shed, with fireworks exploding above their heads. The smell of cordite and alcohol, stars spangling the velvety dark like fairy lights. The start of something magical.

Sitting on the wall now, Olivia allowed herself the pleasure of some happy memories. She’d been shy and giggly back then, laughing with embarrassment when he told her she was beautiful, because she didn’t know how to take a compliment. ‘I mean it,’ he said, just as people started shouting the countdown to midnight. TEN! NINE! EIGHT! ‘Let’s kiss on “one”,’ he’d suggested boldly, and suddenly she wasn’t shy any more; excited instead as the numbers decreased. THREE! TWO! ONE! Her first kiss! And then . . . HAPPY NEW YEAR! Fireworks were zooming and bursting, tearing up the dark sky with crackles and bangs. Their friends were all hugging each other and snogging, and someone was trying and failing to remember the words to ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

‘Happy New Year,’ Aidan said to her with a grin before they kissed again.

‘Two kisses in two years,’ she’d joked, feeling fizzy and dizzy, as if rockets and bangers were shooting all over her body as well as up in the sky. Aidan Brearley had kissed her!

Good times, she thought now, remembering the cold dark night, frost on the car windscreens as he walked her home later, hand-in-hand, both of them wondering what the new year would bring. Optimistic times. ‘You were a bloody good kisser,’ she said quietly now into the warm summer air. ‘I haven’t forgotten, you know.’