Hilary sees Leah nudging him with her foot, but Jake just laughs and looks to the others to join him. Greg smiles and Hilary gulps her wine. He cannot know the shot of anguish that’s going through her, the harsh abrasion of those words.

‘It’s just so hard to imagine him doing that,’ Leah murmurs now, as if to herself.

‘What makes you say that?’ Hilary asks. Outwardly, she is calm, smiling in the sun, but she remembers that night in the garden, the way she’d seen Anton leaning forward to touch the young woman’s wrist. ‘There’s something so familiar about you,’ he’d said.

‘He just seems so sad, I suppose. When he talks of his wife, he still sounds sort of broken about it. Like he misses her.’

‘Did he actually say that?’ She keeps her voice level, careful not to betray the emotions bubbling inside.

‘Yes, he did. I think he’s lonely, and sort of lost. I feel sorry for him. And I know that sounds crazy, given what he did, but …’

Jake has been listening to all this with a growing sense of unrest. Now, he leans forward, and says to her: ‘You haven’t been talking to him again, have you?’

‘Not lately, no.’

‘Good.’

The word is spoken emphatically and Hilary can see the instant effect it has. Leah’s face grows solemn, her eyes cold. The glance she gives him is hard, flinty. Then she looks down into her lap, her voice dropping as she says: ‘There’s just something about him that’s very calm. That’s all.’

‘Cold, I think you mean.’ Hilary surprises herself by saying this aloud. Surprises herself with her sharpness. ‘That calmness you speak of is really the ice in his veins.’

Leah looks up at her, and for just a split second, Hilary sees the challenge in the woman’s eye – a surprising fierceness piercing her expression. But then she blinks, the challenge sinking down within her, and casually turns away.

After they’ve gone, Hilary pours herself a tumbler of brandy and takes it upstairs. Her bedroom is situated at the front of the house and she pulls the chair from her dressing-table up to the window. She rests her hot feet against the cold radiator as she sips the unfamiliar drink. Brandy doesn’t agree with her. The hangovers from it are punishing. But this evening she’s feeling a little reckless. She has half a mind to knock back a couple, then march over to Anton’s house, demand he let her in.

Instead, she sips slowly and waits.

Hilary is a watchful person, although that was not always the case. Now, when she thinks about it, she realizes the sense of surveillance that forms such a deep part of her had first taken shape in the summer of 1999, and it was because of Anton.