Well, of course she found it cool, Maggie thought, trying not to roll her eyes. She was fourteen and had always lived in a house with clean tea-towels and bleach squirted regularly down the sink. This sort of lifestyle must look glamorous and bohemian to her, just as it would have done to Maggie at the same age. Nowadays her instinct was to put on a pair of rubber gloves and possibly a biohazard suit, and start thoroughly disinfecting the surfaces.

‘Very nice,’ she said tightly, trying not to look as if she was sneering. It would play right into Amelia’s views of Maggie being the boring parent and Will being the exciting one, if she started acting disparaging or patronizing now. ‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ she added for good measure, although she couldn’t help a sarcastic edge creeping in. But then her gaze turned to the window, through which she noticed a woman and two small children outside in the garden, and all comments about decor and food-poisoning risks vanished from her mind altogether.

So there they were. The ones who had tamed Will Evans and persuaded him to stay, where Maggie had failed. Her breath tightened in her lungs. She wished now that she had bothered to put some make-up on, just to act as armour, a buffer between the situation and the real, vulnerable Maggie underneath. Had she even brushed her hair properly that morning? Why had she not thought this through?

Will went and banged on the window. ‘Guys! They’re here,’ he called.

The woman – Celeste, presumably – had aubergine-coloured, rather stringy hair that fell down to the centre of her back. (It didn’t look as if she had brushed it, either, at least. Or even washed it for a while.) She was small and slight, dressed in a billowing Indian-print dress with grubby bare feet, and Maggie immediately felt every inch of her five-foot-ten height. (‘Don’t hunch, Maggie,’ her mother’s catchphrase had been, when Maggie was a self-conscious teenager. She could feel herself hunching again; she was a huge, lumbering carthorse compared to this slender foal of a woman.)

‘Hello,’ she managed to croak as Celeste entered the room. So this was Will’s type now, was it? About as different as you could get from enormous, solid Maggie. Good to know.

The children were introduced, but in such earnest terms – ‘This is Thistle, he’s five and loves wind turbines. This is Rain, she’s three and wants to protect the Amur leopard’ – that Maggie started to wonder if the whole set-up here was one colossal parody. Come on, seriously? Was she actually meant to be impressed by a three-year-old’s contribution to feline conservation efforts?

‘Lovely,’ she managed to say, when the silence that followed let her know that yes, clearly she was.