‘What I put online for you,’ James murmured, and she had walked away, open-mouthed, wanting the entire station to share in her indignation: a gesture which felt empty, because after thirty paces or so she’d had to turn around and walk back and ask James what they were going to do next.

What they did next was to wait on a crowded platform, next to a mother with two bickering children who was carrying an enormous crocodile-shaped lilo and kept visibly thinking about throwing it onto the tracks. What they did next was to stand next to the toilet, in silence, for three and a quarter hours on a delayed service that dragged them towards an appointment they were already late for, James staring out of the window with such unbroken focus that he might have been hypnotized. Michaela reflected on the fact that many of the things she’d said in the argument, many of the criticisms she’d put into James’s mouth, must have been things she was thinking about herself. ‘It’s like I was looking for an excuse for the fight to start,’ she said, much later, to the therapist. ‘Which is typical me.’ (I don’t think it’s helpful to talk in generalizations about your personality, said the therapist; I’m interested in the specifics.)

Even when they got shamefacedly to the fancy Scottish place – stone lions by the doorway, lanterns along the drive, the sort of place someone like Johnny Depp would probably get married in – Michaela had still thought this would pass, it would be OK. They’d have a couple of drinks, maybe there would be karaoke. Michaela had a ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ that could blow the birds out of the trees; a stranger had offered her a recording contract once in a Lucky Voice place in London, although it later turned out he was blind drunk and also not connected to the music industry. Surely it wouldn’t have to be a big deal, because they were here now, weren’t they? And if Michaela ever got married (which she wouldn’t do in a pretentious bloody castle like this, by the way, she thought) – but if she ever married James, for example (which she realized in her guts didn’t sit right as a fantasy) – well, she wouldn’t spoil her own day stressing over who got there when. The whole thing was about celebration, wasn’t it? As the taxi crunched over the gravel, she was almost certain their lateness would be forgotten already. But there was James’s sister, in the slim-fitting, expensive-looking dress (Michaela would want something more colourful, less wedding). Arms folded, standing on the steps, as if she’d literally been waiting for them right here since the second they left the church.