The launch, held on the first floor of the bookshop, is already heaving, guests spilling down the staircase and squeezed into the narrow aisles between the shelves and the display tables. Hilary pushes single-mindedly through the throng until she reaches the catering table and helps herself to a glass of white wine. It tastes acidic but she doesn’t care – in fact, she welcomes the bite.

She feels a little giddy – a slug of cheap booze on top of the adrenalin rush of Greg’s news swirls around inside her, loosening her emotions. She can cope with the news. Hilary is one of life’s great copers. Robust. Determinedly optimistic.

So Anton is out. So what?

She surveys the room, the clusters of people she knows or half knows – always the same faces mingling at these events. ‘Cliques’, Greg calls them, with disdain. ‘The literary scene is too cliquey,’ he complains. Whereas Hilary wishes to God he would just find himself a clique and join in. Socialize. Even now at this party, where he must know at least half a dozen people – she can see his editor standing right there in Health & Living, for pity’s sake – Greg is standing off to one side, alone, leafing through a book.

I wonder what Anton looks like now.

The thought sneaks up on her from nowhere. Hilary blinks and swallows, then thrusts her glass out for a passing member of staff to refill.

She should mingle. Or go and rescue Greg. She owes him that much. After all, it’s Hilary’s fault they’re here. Her fault, because it was her idea – her actions – that had turned Greg into a writer when he might have been perfectly happy sticking to his day job teaching geography to the teenage sons of south-east Dublin’s middle classes. But he hadn’t been happy – in fact, he had been depressed. At least they had his teacher’s salary and hers, she used to tell him, the long holidays, the summers off. While friends and neighbours were losing their jobs, their businesses, during the recession, Hilary and Greg were permanent and pensionable. They were lucky, she used to tell him. It became a refrain of hers, a bulwark against the black tide of his depression.