But the thought of the wedding, and the way he and Michaela had missed it, stopped her mind in its tracks. Michaela had a lot to answer for, she really did. With her fucking pantsuits. Talking about how she’d ‘discovered’ quinoa as if she’d stumbled upon it on the banks of the Amazon or something, when in fact she hadn’t even mastered pronouncing it. Calling herself a businesswoman, who’d invented the concept of ‘plus-size running’. James had never been the same once he was with her. If they hadn’t met, if she hadn’t driven Sal and James apart, would they be in this situation right now?

All right. Anger was not the right response. Nor was sentimentality. The present was what counted. Sal was good at this stuff. Mentally, she sketched out a five-point plan.

1. Make this list. (This was a little joke of Sal’s. She’d put it in all her time-management books. Sometimes, readers tweeted her pictures of lists with this at the top. It wasn’t just a gag; it was meant to relax you, release a bit of the tension that held you back from making good gut decisions.)

2. Go back to office, grab laptop, delegate anything high-priority to Meghan. (Not ‘hi-pri’. She wished to God she could stop Meghan saying that. Australians loved to abbreviate, but this was a millennial buzzword too far.)

3. Get out of office. Breathing exercises.

4. Reach out to James’s network, see who can help.

5. Go for a walk, assess it in an hour.

It was pretty simple. There was no wizardry to her lists, ever. The opposite. They were about simplifying. You could solve any problem in five steps.

All the same, as she headed back in towards the lifts – Arnie rising, with his infinite slowness, once more – Sal felt an unfamiliar doubt gnawing at her. Who were James’s social circle? Once more it dug her in the heart, the fact was that since the wedding debacle, they’d barely communicated. Three years lost that way. She didn’t know if James had a girlfriend these days. There was still Karl, the black guy who talked so much like a contract killer she was never sure if he was putting it on. But James didn’t work for him any more, she’d gathered from Mum. Although the details escaped Sally now. It was hard to take much concrete information from the weekly phone calls, because of Mum’s tendency to approach them as if Sal was a recently escaped hostage (oh, you’ve missed so much, now, what did I have to tell you) and to ricochet between unrelated topics, like a social media feed in a Laura Ashley cardigan.

‘Going to work somewhere out of the office?’ said Meghan, her tongue flicking out and playing around her lips, as it sometimes did when she was anxious.

‘No, Meghan. I’m off to inspect a building site.’