‘Right, well, thanks for making such an effort,’ had been her opening words. Michaela, she admitted to the therapist later, should probably have opened with an apology, rather than trying to hug Sally and say congratulations. (Why do you think you did that? the therapist asked. Because I’m a touchy-feely person, I guess, Michaela had said, but the therapist hadn’t written it down, so she felt she’d failed the question.)

‘The trains …’ James had begun.

‘Yes, if only there was some way of planning around that,’ Sally had snapped, like she’d had it ready for hours.

‘We’re not all time-management experts,’ Michaela muttered – meaning it as an ice-breaker, a compliment even. But in Sally’s mind it had somehow read as a sneer, and she’d turned and walked away. In James’s eyes, following her, Michaela could see that in some ways he was on his sister’s side. If there was a single moment, a single thought that ended it, it was that one.

*

So maybe the floor of the relationship – however solid it had seemed – was really a sheet of ice which would have cracked one day or another. And the bloody events of the next few hours and days, the ripples and aftershocks, the exchange of nasty texts between Michaela and Sal – all this was just a blowtorch. Even though, before the wedding day, she would have said that she and James were great together, were happy, that couldn’t have been completely true. There must have been something missing all along.

All the same, they could have patched it up, like people did after an argument. Things were prickly, and it didn’t help that James’s way of addressing the charged atmosphere was to continue holding work conversations, keep bringing her the matcha latte in the morning, try to smother the memory of the falling-out with a big thick blanket of decency. But they could have patched it up. It was true what James had said: people didn’t just tear up a four-year romance because of one wrong note, however jarring. Yet the fact was, a fortnight after the wedding disaster, Michaela had texted a friend to complain that things were still tense at home, and the friend had invited her to a boozy art event sponsored by O2, and Michaela wasn’t bothered about art but did like Prosecco, and hadn’t been out properly for a while because of the sodding running.