‘I looked up his website,’ Amelia said, as if this was a given. ‘He’s not exactly hiding away, Mum; his work’s all over the Internet. Then I followed him on Twitter and we just started to chat.’

Blood was roaring around Maggie’s brain, shock beating through her that this had all been going on without her having the slightest idea. Why hadn’t Amelia said anything earlier? Why hadn’t she confided in Maggie that she might approach him, asked her opinion? She could have warned Amelia off, braced her to expect disappointment – and gone to Will herself, to threaten him, Don’t you dare break her heart. Because he would. You bet he would.

She found herself thinking about the chunky silver bracelet he had bought her one birthday. It was heavy and made her wrist ache, and privately it reminded her of a manacle, but she’d told him she loved it and wore it nonetheless. She even went on wearing it for years after he’d left, just in case he came back unexpectedly and noticed it there on her arm, recognized the symbolism of her having waited loyally all this time. But he hadn’t come back and eventually she had taken it off and shoved it in her jewellery box, where it had lain ever since. It was going a bit green now, as she hadn’t taken care of it, and smelled musty, of old metal. Something had stopped her from getting rid of it, but right now she felt like driving home and throwing it straight into the nearest river. There! What do you think of that for symbolism?

‘I see,’ she said in a strangled voice. Stay neutral, she reminded herself. Don’t antagonize her. The quickest way to ensure Amelia’s shutters came rattling down was to argue. ‘And . . . how’s that going?’

‘He’s really cool,’ Amelia said, and it was as if a sixteenth-century battering ram had punched Maggie’s heart right out of her body. It was all she could do not to whimper in pain.

‘Great,’ she said weakly. ‘Good.’

The man who had used her up and tossed her away, the man who had washed his hands of them both and walked out, with barely a backward glance at his ex-wife and infant child. This man was cool? No, he was not. He really was not. But now he was back in her head, looking at her with that curled lip. The trouble with you, Maggie, is that you’re too bloody intense. You’re needy. And I can’t live like this.

Her mouth trembled, remembering. I’m not the problem here, mate, she wished she’d shouted. Better intense than not caring!

‘So I was thinking, maybe I could go and meet him,’ Amelia was saying, not seeming to have noticed that her mother was visibly crumbling, just like the ancient fortress wall currently propping her up.