‘Please. Becks. I’m trying to tell you this.’ She glances down as she feels his hand touch her. Feels the warmth and insistence that transmits itself through skin and flesh and blood on its journey to her heart. She dares herself to look up at him and fails the challenge. ‘I told her that I didn’t feel the same way. I’d thought I might feel the same way, but I realized it was more like I was willing it to happen, if that makes sense.’

‘It makes sense.’

‘I don’t love her.’

‘Good.’

‘What does that mean?’ he asks, after falling silent for a moment.

‘I don’t know,’ says Becky.

‘Do you really not know?’

But Adam’s words are carried up through the peppermint-scented steam puffing from an open steam-room door, interrupted by the gleeful laughs coming from the swimming pool and finally forgotten as Becky turns her attention to what is playing out in front of her: Maisie and the boy, who is now by her side in the pool, both leaning on their forearms, speaking into the tiles before turning to face each other. Laughing again.

‘If you’re thinking of getting a cocktail, I’m in,’ she says, not taking her eyes off this scene. As if she might miss something crucial if she did.

Adam looks at her for a moment, then lets his head drop a little, disheartened perhaps. ‘What’s your poison?’

Their laughter is getting louder. The boy is leaning in further to show Maisie something on his arm and Becky cranes to see what. Then Adam lightly touches the top of Becky’s wrist to get her attention and she leaps out of her skin.

‘Woah,’ he says. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to …’ She looks at him like he’s just appeared. ‘I just wanted to know what you’d like to drink?’

‘I don’t know, nothing, I don’t want anything.’

‘Right, I’ll just get the one.’ He pauses. ‘Becks? They’re just talking.’ The pool water splashes over the edge as one of them showers the other in a playful game. ‘Let her have her fun before you send in the lifeguards.’

She blushes, looking over to Maisie, feeling caught in idiocy.

She waits for Adam to depart for the bar before she stands up. She can see the alchemy happening between boy and girl in a swimming pool, the magical violet and emerald and silver mist passing between their lips, swirling in a vortex around their two bodies, the Wizard of Oz twister that takes away the house. There is no time to waste, she must interrupt now, and break the spell before it is complete.

Becky stands at the pool’s edge. ‘Come on, Mais, we’re going for an early dinner.’