She was the one who had acted like a crazy woman, upending their lives, but, if only Lou could understand, Kelly was only a kid too. She was a kid when she’d made her decisive choice, marrying on the rebound from a devastating public humiliation, literally left at the altar by literally her childhood sweetheart. Talk about a cliché pile-on. She felt the return of every corpuscle of blood and fury that had flooded her neck and shoulders, all her bare parts and her covered parts, waiting in the church, the dread certainty of what was unfolding. She knew it the moment she walked up the aisle. It was out of order, the bride first. Where was Dog? Oh, probably gone outside for a nervous smoke. Why didn’t anyone stop her? Instead of saving her embarrassment, her fuckwit father had made her enter the silent church, all those people’s faces on her. Maybe he was thinking he could still pull it out of the fire; but not even Noel Chidgey’s indomitable will could conjure the groom.

Or maybe he did, just his timing was off. And his aim. Dog’s best man—the first face to smile at her, completely detached from the horror as if he were a halfwit, floating in some kind of reverie—was Gordon Grimes. A groom was waiting for her, not the one she was in love with, but the one she would marry, same place, same set-up, eight months later.

‘You fell for Gordon just like that,’ Lou asked, or rather stated.

But then—flash forward, where did her life go!—thirty years’ worth of unanswered questions had collapsed into one night at her and Gordon’s joint fiftieth at the Hilton. Bluebird, sunset … all these deadshits’ idea of perfection. She only had a few steps to travel back to that fork in the road. She wondered if anyone really changed. She would have been surprised to look in the mirror and see that she was not twenty and made up for her first wedding day … and here was her long-lost groom … well, not exactly long-lost, recast as family friend, married father of two and all that, legal practitioner, man about town blah blah blah, historicised as if none of it had happened to her. And primed on resentment, reflection, a refillable flute of Veuve and the three quick lines Dog had beckoned her for in an upstairs room, what else was she to do but grab the impending midlife crisis before Gordon took it first?

‘What a mess, and all of my own making.’ For once, she couldn’t blame Gordon, her late father, her lamented stepmother, her brother, or even Dog: in that trip through time, all her nemeses had evaporated, leaving only herself. It had been strangely liberating, to be the sole author of her misfortune. At last she owned something.

Appearances lied. She was still a kid. But she couldn’t expect Lou to understand that.