Olivia was sitting on a slightly creaky rattan chair admiring the view from the old stone terrace: long formal gardens stretching out in front of her, with rolling purple moorland in the distance. The lawns were verdant, the flowerbeds well tended; there was no sound other than birdsong from the trees and the faint hum of conversation from another couple at the end of the terrace. The occasional clink of a cup being returned to its saucer.

‘Earl Grey tea?’ said a waiter, appearing beside her just then with a tray balanced on his hand.

‘Thank you, yes,’ she said, and he deftly set down the crockery on the table, followed by a milk jug and sugar bowl, then the white china teapot with steam curling in wisps from its spout.

‘Can I get you anything else?’ he asked, holding the empty tray behind his back. He was in his early twenties, she guessed, and terribly earnest. The sort of nice young man whose parents were undoubtedly very proud of him. She wondered, as she had done so many times over the years, about Leon and what he was doing now; whether he was working like the waiter here, or a student. What he looked like. If he was happy.

‘No, thank you,’ she said, worried suddenly that she was staring at the waiter too intently. He made a slight bow and walked away and then she was alone again. Alone again, that was, but not for much longer. Here she had come, to a rather nice hotel on the fringes of Dartmoor, waiting for the rest of her life to begin. She hoped it was going to be okay.

Sitting parked up in the lay-by earlier as lorries and coaches hurtled by, she and Mack had gone on to have one of the most honest and revealing conversations of their lives. She had confessed the recent state of her head: how inadequate she had been feeling as a mother, how hard she found the day-to-day routine, and how she had gone to some pretty dark places in her mind; dark places that perhaps her own mother had visited before her.

Out it had all come, her secret self-doubt and unhappiness. She laid it out for him like an unrolling carpet – the raw, real Olivia, there to be trampled over. It had felt both liberating and terrifying to peel away the mask, to say, Here I am. This is what you married.