When she doesn’t call back, I go to the restaurant and order a burger. There’s no point in us having the same conversation over and over, but by ten p.m., when I’m ready for bed, I feel the need to try. Her phone goes straight to voicemail and I don’t leave a message.

Half an hour later I’m drifting asleep when a loud knock on my door makes me sit up rapidly, blood rushing to my head. ‘Who is it?’ I call out as I pull back the covers.

‘Me.’

‘Bonnie?’ I make my way across the room, opening the door as she pushes past me. ‘What are you doing here?’ As I switch on a lamp that fills the room with light, I see she’s unsteady as she plops down on to the bed.

‘Tell me you haven’t been drinking.’

‘I had one.’

‘Bonnie,’ I sigh. ‘Don’t lie.’

‘It isn’t a lie. I have only had one.’ She at least has the presence to look guilty as she avoids my gaze and fiddles with the corner of the duvet.

‘But even one …’ I shake my head. ‘And you’ve driven all the way here. Why did you do it?’

‘You weren’t there,’ she snaps. ‘I needed it.’

‘You didn’t even talk to me first,’ I say, sinking on to the bed next to her. ‘You always promised you’d do that if ever you got to this point.’

‘You don’t have to look quite so disappointed in me,’ she says. ‘I can carry that weight for the two of us.’

I shake my head. ‘I’m so angry with you. After everything—’

‘Don’t you want to know why I had a drink?’ she asks, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Why I had to have one glass of wine?’

‘Of course I do.’

A tear trickles down her cheeks and she dips her head but doesn’t bother wiping it away. ‘I’d been trying so hard,’ she says in a whisper. ‘I didn’t want to. But you haven’t been there, Stella.’

‘I’m always at the end of the phone.’

‘That’s not what I mean. You’re not there in the sense that I want one thing and you want something completely different, and I can’t – I can’t handle it.’ Her hands continue to fiddle with the duvet.

‘What is it you can’t handle?’

‘All of it. The past.’ She holds her head up and stares at the ceiling. She doesn’t seem to care that tears keep sliding down her cheeks and roll off the end of her chin. ‘I was seventeen when I had my first drink. It was three months after we’d left the island. By the end of the night I’d had more than I could count, but it was the first time I’d stopped thinking.